Military Worship & the Republic

By Ivan Eland

April 12, 2006

Editor's Note: During key moments of the Iraq conflict, George W. Bush's supporters have silenced war skeptics by charging that any dissent would hurt the troops. War critics were accused of undermining morale of American soldiers or demeaning their sacrifice.

Satirists have summarized this debate-stopping question as "why do you hate the troops?"

Yet beyond the question of whether you're "supporting the troops" by keeping quiet as they are dispatched to an unwise war, there is the additional question of whether venerating the military is healthy for any democratic Republic. In this guest essay, the Independent Institute's Ivan Eland addresses that issue:

Since the Vietnam War, in which returning draftees were shunned by much of American society, critics of U.S. foreign policy, including the Iraq War, have bent over backwards not to criticize U.S. military forces and have praised soldiers’ willingness to fight for their country.