In April 2004, Stars and Stripes <a href="http://stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=21007&archive=true">first reported</a> that our troops were using makeshift vehicle armor fashioned out of sandbags, yet when a soldier <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/08/international/middleeast/08cnd-rumsfeld.html">complained</a> to Donald Rumsfeld at a town meeting in Kuwait eight months later, he was successfully pilloried by the right. Proper armor procurement lagged for months more to come. Not until early this year, four years after the war’s first casualties, did <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/17/AR2007021701172.html">a Washington Post investigation</a> finally focus the country’s attention on the shoddy treatment of veterans, many of them victims of inadequate armor, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals.

We first learned of the use of contractors as mercenaries when four Blackwater employees were <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06E4DC1539F932A35757C0A9629C8B63">strung up</a> in Falluja in March 2004, just weeks before the <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/03/slideshow_040503">first torture photos</a> emerged from Abu Ghraib. We asked few questions. When <a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/front/story/626324.html">reports surfaced</a> early this summer that our contractors in Iraq (180,000, of whom <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,2138917,00.html">some 48,000</a> are believed to be security personnel) now outnumber our postsurge troop strength, we yawned. Contractor casualties and contractor-inflicted casualties are kept off the books.

It was always the White House’s plan to coax us into a blissful ignorance about the war. Part of this was achieved with the usual Bush-Cheney secretiveness, from the torture memos to the prohibition of photos of military coffins. But the administration also invited our passive complicity by requiring no shared sacrifice. A country that knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch was all too easily persuaded there could be a free war.

Instead of taxing us for Iraq, the White House bought us off with tax cuts. Instead of mobilizing the needed troops, it kept a draft off the table by quietly purchasing its auxiliary army of contractors to finesse the overstretched military’s holes. With the war’s entire weight falling on a small voluntary force, amounting to less than 1 percent of the population, the rest of us were free to look the other way at whatever went down in Iraq.

We ignored the contractor scandal to our own peril. Ever since Falluja this auxiliary army has been a leading indicator of every element of the war’s failure: not only our inadequate troop strength but also our alienation of Iraqi hearts and minds and our rampant outsourcing to contractors rife with Bush-Cheney cronies and campaign contributors. Contractors remain a bellwether of the war’s progress today. When Blackwater was <a href="http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jSQ14PoKO8jjCLmzfdzIzty14Ijw">briefly suspended</a> after the Nisour Square catastrophe, American diplomats were flatly forbidden from leaving the fortified Green Zone. So much for the surge’s great “success” in bringing security to Baghdad.

Last week Paul Rieckhoff, an Iraq war combat veteran who directs <a href="http://www.iava.org/">Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America</a>, sketched for me the apocalypse to come. Should Baghdad implode, our contractors, not having to answer to the military chain of command, can simply “drop their guns and go home.” Vulnerable American troops could be deserted by those “who deliver their bullets and beans.”

This potential scenario is just one example of why it’s in our national self-interest to attend to Iraq policy the White House counts on us to ignore. Our national character is on the line too. The extralegal contractors are both a slap at the sovereignty of the self-governing Iraq we supposedly support and an insult to those in uniform receiving as little as <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/30/AR2007093001352.html">one-sixth the pay</a>. Yet it took mass death in Nisour Square to fix even our fleeting attention on this long-metastasizing cancer in our battle plan.

Similarly, it took until December 2005, two and a half years after “Mission Accomplished,” for Mr. Bush to feel sufficient public pressure to <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-12-12-bush-iraq_x.htm">acknowledge</a> the large number of Iraqi casualties in the war. Even now, despite his repeated <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/09/20070903.html">declaration</a> that “America will not abandon the Iraqi people,” he has yet to address or intervene decisively in the tragedy of four million-plus <a href="http://www.unhcr.org/iraq.html">Iraqi refugees</a>, a disproportionate number of them children. He feels no pressure from the American public to do so, but hey, he pays lip service to Darfur.

Our moral trajectory over the Bush years could not be better dramatized than it was by a reunion of an elite group of two dozen World War II veterans in Washington this month. They were participants in a top-secret operation to interrogate some 4,000 Nazi prisoners of war. Until now, they have kept silent, but America’s recent record prompted them to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR2007100502492.html">talk to The Washington Post</a>.