Liberator, you have not the bleeding first clue about what you're going on about, which is why you need to resort to canned expressions of "honor" rather than exhibiting anything heartfelt. You project this glamorous altruism on random authority figures because you lack anything worth fighting for or that you can give a damn about in your own life, and your snide little personal attacks against anybody who examines the issue any further belie your addict's need for the illusion.
Soldiers are soldiers. Trained killers. There is no honor inherent in the position, nor is valuing human life part of the training. In a wartime situation, a few men have the trait and misfortune to exhibit valor and altruism (and it always is unfortunate, never mind the silly way Hollywood paints the glamorous hero riding into the sunset- the very luckiest ones get a quick death). Quite a lot, freed from the confines of any ordered social construct and whatever repressions kept them from taking a semiautomatic rifle to their office place years before, descend into barbarism of a sort that often far exceeds any misanthropy one can see in more civilized times. The absolute vast majority simply "do their job" and act neither courageous nor monstrous- they will generally mow down a village if given orders (as has been done many times in the past and will continue to be), will sometimes engage in relatively risky maneuvers when told to do so, and are generally just the stuff of militaries all over the world. These same proportions can be seen in the civilian populace, and the various people going into the military- the people who genuinely believe in some higher ideal or that they're saving the world, the "I wanna kill ****" types, and the ones who're just looking for a steady paycheck and maybe some direction and never expected to get thrown into a combat zone and shot at in the first place. Collectively, they're meat for the grinder, as far as politics is concerned. No more, no less, and questions of individual valor or evil are irrelevant.
Where it gets more interesting is the command chain, where we lose the generalities that always result from attempting to describe a huge group of people. A good commander will recognize that, at the end of things, these are human beings being dealt with, like them and the ones they know, that no matter what the outcome war is a sum total loss for the human race at large, that the benefits of conflict rarely outweigh the cost in lives and shattered nations (and shattered everything else). And they will accordingly try to avert it in all cases but where the toll on humanity would almost certainly be incredibly vast otherwise, or where the gains seem incredibly great. A bad commander has his vision obfuscated by politics, sees anybody not his countryman (and even most of them) as subhuman, animals that will either obey or be slapped down, and soldiers as mere automatons to do the slapping and make them look good. They will engage in conflict for often deeply personal aims, apathetic to the horrors that occur on the road to victory, and a truly awful one will once they have attained what they came for they often toy with it and abandon all else, ignoring the misery of the conquered and the menace of the future in exchange for momentary gains.
Now. Here we have a man who plans a war years in advance of any evidence of a threat (whether you believe he knew the evidence was false or not, he didn't have it when the war started ramping up), who did so on a flimsy and weak pretext and then followed it up with a pretext that would hardly prove a relative benefit even if carried out, who when warned of a potentially disastrous death rate tells the opposing armies to "bring it on", who has already left one country in anarchic shambles after a bloody conflict with no apparent gain to be had at all other than in forcing one man to change addresses temporarily (something he's been doing for years), and who seems to be well on the way towards doing exactly the same thing to another country. Furthermore, he's specifically invited some of his most prominent financiers to reap the sole spoils of war, and there is once again no return for the greater good at all but the greater good of the heads of Halliburton.
The world is a worse place for Bush having become President, there is no denying that. Hiding it in vague terms of honor and moral rectitude is a deeply cynical and inherently evil endeavor, and fools none but those who've never seen the real deal.
