Honor the Soldier but Not the War?

Should we be honoring our soldiers in Iraq? Gabriel Ash explains why that would be the wrong thing to do (snippet):

We can choose to honor people according to relativistic, aesthetic principles. We can choose to appreciate professionalism for its own sake, without regards to consequences. Indeed, one could say this is the natural moral code of professionals. It allows us to admire the beauty of a perfectly executed murder, the logistical brilliance of the people who designed Auschwitz, the verbal dexterity of a skilled disinformer such as Ari Fleischer, the majesty of the Enola Gay bomber. It allows us to live in peace with our own participation, in countless ways, in the mayhem that our government unleashes upon others and the devastation of the planet by the corporations we work for. But we pay a steep price for this comfort -- a desiccated soul and a dying planet. But wait, you say, our democratic government will cease to function unless people respect legitimate authority even when they disagree with the command. The soldiers risk their lives for their country, taking orders from the properly elected government. Their fulfillment of their duty is thus honorable, even if the orders they obey are not. Putting aside the question of who elected our government, this argument shouldn't be persuasive. If the smooth functioning of the U.S. government is more valuable than the life of its victims, than we shouldn't be honoring people like Daniel Ellsberg and Phillip Berrigan, who disrupted the functioning of the government, and people like Michael Simmons, who spent two years in jail for refusing to serve in Vietnam. We cannot, unless we are confused, honor two such diametrically opposed moral choices simultaneously. Our men and women in uniforms, as they are often called, are just beginning a dirty war against the Iraqi resistance. They blow up buildings and cars of "suspected targets" in the middle of a town. They now demolish homes, a practice learned from that other beacon of virtue, Israel. Without the newspeak, they lash out blindly against unknown Iraqis. The resulting slaughter of civilians is motivated less by the hope of success -- for every fighter accidentally killed in such attacks ten new recruits will join the resistance -- but by the iron demands of Bush's electoral calendar. The heavy handed attacks draw press and create the impression of forward momentum, necessary to protect the presidential swagger. Our men and women in uniform, reduced to hired guns for the Mugger in Chief, deserve compassion and understanding of their predicament. We should wish them a safe return and we should mourn their losses, and we should mourn the people they kill. But to honor them is something altogether different. Honor is more than understanding and compassion. It is the elevation of an act to an example worth following and repeating. If we don't want this war repeated, if we want people to be thoughtful before they engage in killing, to refuse to participate in crimes, even crimes authorized by "legitimate" government, we can't honor the opposite behavior.