An interesting factoid about the English presence in Iraq

From the midst of a post by Chris Floyd quoting from a John Banville book report in the Guardian about John Gray's Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia:

Gray's critique of the war on Iraq, and especially of Blair's part in it, is devastating. His contempt is palpable in these measured and meticulously argued pages. As usual, it is the details that snag in the mind's fabric. British security firms, he writes, are reported to have some 48,000 personnel in Iraq, "outnumbering British troops by a factor of six to one". The war has been privatised, and "the ragtag army of crooks and shysters that followed in the wake of American troops is not greatly different from that which trailed behind the colonial armies of earlier times".