It's a very powerful hammer in our psychological toolkit, and it's been used countless times throughout history.
No one wants to blame the Everyman and his masculine valor for failing the country. So the parts of the national leadership who started the war need to deflect blame, and they do it by attaching themselves to martial myths and posing as defenders of the Everyman. Not like those other dastardly effete leaders who oppose war, who are in a rhetorically weaker position because they're correctly acknowledging that individual valor doesn't play a major role in the outcome of the war. They're easily portrayed as trivializing valor and not glamorizing it sufficiently.
If you talk to old white American soldiers, you can hear the same thing about Vietnam (damn liberals!) and more recently Iraq (damn liberals!). I'm sure you could hear similar things from old Brits nostalgic for Empire.
No one wants to blame the Everyman and his masculine valor for failing the country. So the parts of the national leadership who started the war need to deflect blame, and they do it by attaching themselves to martial myths and posing as defenders of the Everyman. Not like those other dastardly effete leaders who oppose war, who are in a rhetorically weaker position because they're correctly acknowledging that individual valor doesn't play a major role in the outcome of the war. They're easily portrayed as trivializing valor and not glamorizing it sufficiently.
If you talk to old white American soldiers, you can hear the same thing about Vietnam (damn liberals!) and more recently Iraq (damn liberals!). I'm sure you could hear similar things from old Brits nostalgic for Empire.