In President Bush’s war, the role allotted to the American people was to pretend that the conflict did not exist. Despite claims that his would be a generational struggle, the president never considered restoring the draft. Nor did he bother to expand the size of the armed forces. This guaranteed that the 0.5 percent of the population that made up the all-volunteer force would bear the brunt of any sacrifice. With only a handful of dissenters, the remaining 99.5 percent of Americans happily endorsed this distribution effort.

The privatization of war suggests a tacit willingness to transform military service form a civic function into an economic enterprise, with money rather than patriotism the motive. Americans may not like mercenaries, but many of them harbor an even greater dislike for the prospect of sending their loved one to fight in some godforsaken country on the other side of the world.

Given the extent to which a penchant for consumption had become the driveshaft of the global economy, the Bush administration welcomed the average citizen’s inclination to ignore the war and return to the shopping mall.

While soldiers fight, people consumed. With the United States possessing less than 3 percent of the world’s known oil reserves and Americans burning one out of every four barrels of petroleum produced worldwide, oil imports reached 60 percent of daily national requirements and kept rising. The personal savings rate continued to plummet. In 2005, it dropped below zero and has remained there.