Supporting the troops

Baudrillard's article got me thinking about this war (again), and specifically about the hypocrisy behind the "support our troops" movement. Now I realize this is anathema to all of you, but hear me out.
Current events such as those that we read in the papers can be separated between those that allow us to understand better the world (foreign policy pages, politics, economy, etc...) and those just describe individual occurrences (little old lady gets run over on the corner of 5th and Madison, say); we call them "faits divers" & i don't know what the english term for them is. What is interesting about the latter is that while they are largely pointless (what genuine need does one have for the knowledge that some anonymous person has got run over?), we also feel strongly and emotionally about them (maybe we knew this person, and we might also think "i cross this intersection all the time: this could have been me", or we might feel sincerely sad that a nice little old ladies got run over). This is the realm of the purely emotional, until some discussion is made about the absurdity of the world that we live in, say, where people get killed for not being fast enough, at which point the story migrates from the "fait divers" back into the say, sociological page.
Support the troops is the opposite trip in that it brings a foreign policy decision to the realm of the purely emotional faits divers. Don't like the policy? Well you must hate the people serving. It is a subterfuge to hush opposition to policy by bringing it down into the purely emotional level. (It also leads to comically self-contradictory statements such as when rummie was both "supporting the troops" and stating that one goes with the army one has when it came out that troops had insufficient body armor to protect themselves and that the pentagon was doing shamefully little about it.) What is most frightening about it is that it is rhetoric that is entirely independent from context: you could decide to go to war for the purpose of wiping out say, all [pick your ethnicity here] just because they are [] and we don't like [], and still argue that opponents aren't supportive of the troops.