So much ink has been spilled about the horrific mutilations in Fallujah the other day, I wonder if I can add much at this point.

But I finally saw almost all of the footage sitting in the Baghdad offices of Al Arabiya the other day. The Dubai-based Arab satellite channel has frequently won the ire of the coalition for running unvarnished images of the results of attacks on Americans, and was once banned from reporting from Iraq for two months by the coalition.

While I understand why most Western TV stations have shied away from showing all of the pictures (and it’s probably a decision I’d make if I was an editor) I felt I had to see it: The ecstatic little boy in the foreground of the burning cars and bodies, the viciousness with which grown men treated the corpses, the absence of a US military response to secure the area, and the seeming awareness of the 100 or so participants that they were creating a media event that would be transmitted around the globe.

The comparisons to Somalian crowds parading the corpse of a US soldier through the streets of Mogadishu in 1993 are perhaps a little misleading. After all, this was a group of civilian warriors attacked on their own in an environment known to be incredibly dangerous, not a group of Army Rangers fighting to survive after their helicopter was shot down by what the American people had been led to believe was an overmatched and incompetent foe. But that incident has been referred back to again and again for over a year. From day one, Iraqi insurgents and their allies, as well as the occasional letter from Al Qaeda and its clones, have made mention of Mogadishu and of their plan to try to break the US will in the same way. There’s almost no doubt that at least some of the mutilators had Somalia in mind.

Anyone would struggle looking at these pictures. But as reporters, we’re always trying to understand what happens in a war zone, while making no apology for it.

I’ve always been able to understand the motivations of insurgents – the confluence of nationalism or religion with their deep feelings of humiliation and fear that “regime change” means a reversal of political fortunes. But for the first time, all I could come up with was revulsion and anger at what had been done, and wonder if this is a mindset that I’ll ever honestly be able to understand.

The clerics of Fallujah – who have been united in calling for attacks on the coalition in their Friday sermons – have distanced themselves and their people from the horror. Sheik Fawzi Nameq in central Fallujah referred on Friday to the sura, or verse, in the Koran that prohibits such mutilations on vanquished opponents. The sura says you shouldn’t even destroy the body of a mad-dog – dogs being considered unclean animals by most Muslims. But there wasn’t much comfort in his other comments since they explicitly avoided condemning the killings themselves. One cleric, in a case of circular logic, said the violation of the religious principle proved that locals weren’t responsible, because such acts would never be carried out by Muslims. This sort of attitude – condemning the crime but not the criminals – probably assures that violence will continue in the city.

What of the victims - the four American contractors employed by Blackwater Security Consulting? It may be unfair, but most of the foreigners I hang out with lump all of these guys into the “mercenary” category. While they’re mostly ex-soldiers with guns, the range of temperaments and abilities is vast. Some of the Blackwater guys stayed at the Monitor’s current hotel, including the intense, quiet Jerry who was killed in the attack. I never met him, but an upstairs neighbor of mine said the polyglot ex-Seal – who appeared to speak excellent Arabic – frequently paced the upper hallways of the hotel, fingering a sidearm and in a tank-top that revealed bunched, lean muscles on his arms.

Around here the Blackwater guys have something of a menacing aura. Tough guys with an edge, and without the bonhomie of a lot of the ex-soldiers, who once they’ve decided you’re not an enemy tend to be a back-slapping, cheerful lot.

Not so the Blackwater fellows. People’s impressions of them were of deadly confidence, far different from a group of British and South African mercenaries I came across at the Hamra, our last hotel (which we left a few months ago because their room-rates were skyrocketing) in Baghdad. Put up in the hotel for a few days of R&R, they behaved like a high-school football team without a chaperon. By 11 pm, they were thoroughly sauced and the rowdy drinking games and rugby songs that had been heard from their room all evening while I and a few friends had a dinner party began to spill out into the hallways.

Answering a knock at my door, I found two brawny, naked men on their knees, evoking the Seven Dwarfs down some war-zone rabbit hole: “Hi ho, Hi ho, it’s off to war we go, with a pick and a spade and a hand-grenade, hi ho, hi ho” etc. Shortly after we bustled them out, we heard a commotion on the street outside the hotel compound: They were parading through the Iraqi neighborhood, some naked, shouting and chanting. They finished up by throwing all of the plastic furniture on the hotel patio into the pool, leaving it for the hotel’s underpaid staff to clean up the next morning.

Savage? Hardly. But it certainly made me wonder about the wisdom of the 10,000-plus private army that has been put to work in Iraq. My doubts only grew after catching sight of Iraqis in the apartments across the street peering out from between their curtains.

Soldiers would be thrown into the brig, at least, for such misbehavior, discipline keeping a lid on the anxiety and pressures that lead to horseplay in this environment. There’s no indication that Blackwater’s men were anything but professional and competent, simply caught in an ambush where they didn’t have a chance to use their training to save themselves. But with the flood of stories on the security contractors since, I thought this minor event was worth airing.

To an Iraqi, any foreigner with a gun here is a soldier, probably an American, and when people outside of the US chain of command behave badly, the US will wear it in the eyes of the locals. (By Dan Murphy)