Last night I was watching Larry King interview a sitting Senator, and like other pundits he kept trying to pin the Senator down on a question that is, at its heart, unanswerable: Are Americans dying in vain in Iraq?

It's a difficult issue to address properly in drive-by cable news show interviews, or even in at-length reasoned discourse. Semantics become especially important in discussions of this sort, because there are conflicting concepts at the core of the debate.

Psychologists use the term "cognitive dissonance" to refer to the rather difficult mental balancing act involved in simultaneously holding contradictory or otherwise incompatible attitudes and beliefs. That's kind of what we're dealing with here.

On the one hand, we want to believe (and rightly so) that no honorable soldier truly dies in vain because each individual is one of what the same Senator once referred to as the "young men and women who in the end were fighting as much for their love of each other as for the love of country that brought them there in the first place."

In that context, every honorable solider is fighting for his or her comrades in arms; for his or her own sense of honor and duty; and for his or her love of home, hearth and country.

The first is quite concrete, and it is something that every soldier absolutely must be able to count on if he or she is to survive the horrors of war. The latter two are more abstract, but such abstraction is also necessary if a military organization and society as a whole is to survive the horrors of war.

So from that standpoint, this statement is absolutely correct: no, they are not dying in vain in Iraq. But from another opposing and often antithetical standpoint, this statement also is absolutely correct: yes, they are dying in vain in Iraq.

Military history is full of examples of botched plans, faulty tactics, invalid strategies, false missions, and immoral reasons for war. When the decisions made upstream of them are wrong, when the policies upstream of them of them are wrong, when the rationale of those upstream of them are wrong, then those honorable soldiers' courage is misused, their lives are needlessly sacrificed -- and, yes, their deaths are in vain.

Like I said, the psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. But the logic of war, by its very nature, is essentially unsound. There simply is no rational way to resolve the inherent conflicts of the many causes and concerns and ethics and morals and rationales involved in the waging of war. War is not just hell; it is fundamentally insane.

That being said, there is one larger aspect of this question that I really wish the Senator and those asking him to address it would have covered: we are not just discussing whether American soldiers are dying in vain in Iraq, we are also discussing whether other Americans are dying in vain in Iraq as well. To my mind, the answer to that is unequivocally yes.

Soldiers who die in avoidable accidents die in vain. Soldiers who die from friendly fire die in vain. Non-combatant support personnel and contractors who die from unfriendly fire die in vain. Doctors, nurses, missionaries, activists who are murdered or kidnapped die in vain.

But there is one more unmentioned and unmourned class of Americans in Iraq who absolutely die in vain -- and, imho, fully deserve to.

These are the legions of so-called 'security contractors' who are fighting over there not for honor, not for glory, not for the love of country or the sake of their loved ones at home, but for the blood money that they receive in return.

Call these men and women what they are: mercenaries, pure and simple. Soldiers of fortune, hired guns, paid killers -- men and women whose very choice of profession renders them fundamentally without honor.

The dirty little secret of our much-vaunted all-volunteer army is that it is made possible by this country's, and this country's corporations', shameless employment of mercenaries -- hired killers without honor -- to do their nasty business while still keeping their political and financial hands clean.

The American military effort in Iraq depends on the widespread use of mercenaries. Everybody knows about it, but nobody talks about it and nobody does anything about it.

And that, to my mind, is truly obscene.