Love the soldiers hate the war = cognitive dissodance

Please help me, I am having a hard time understanding one of the core ideas behind the anti-war movement. It seems to me that their ideas have been stuck in amber since the 1960s. One of the most idiotic of these is that it makes sense to denounce the war while at the same time “supporting” the troops. Stupid.

In case no one has heard, we switched to an all-volunteer military a long time ago. This change in the manpower of our military should change the whole basis of the debate on the war. Those of us who choose to serve no longer need anyone’s pity. That also means that laady-daady everybody in the military right now knew exactly what they were getting into when they joined up. Everybody knows that we are at war and likely to remain that way for a long time. We all elected to join up knowing this. Is it too much to ask that our sacrifices mean something?

As John McCain said in a book written by his aide as quoted in the International Herald Tribune: “In response to the criticism that a protracted war is ‘breaking the army,’ Salter said McCain ‘answers as an officer in the Vietnam era: He says the only thing worse than an exhausted or broken army is a defeated army.’” International Herald Tribune March 18, 2007