By going to Iraq, the US troops are taking the position of one who agrees to serve the most powerful and dangerous actor; they are in the position of one who decides to become a henchman of the most powerful actor as he goes out to attack those who cannot effectively fight back.
What the US's troops were doing to the Iraqis was not heroic, according to the ordinary definition of heroism:
1. We do not normally call it heroic when aggressors kill defenders, as in this case. The Iraqi troops were not trying to attack any other country.
2. We do not ordinarily call it heroic when the powerful slaughter the helpless, as in this case. The US troops were much more powerful than the Iraqi troops, and killed them easily with minimal danger to themselves; kill ratios were greater than ten to one from the beginning and were in the neighborhood of fifty or one hundred to one for the conquest as a whole. Of course these kill ratios are misleading, because the number of innocent Americans killed by the Iraqis was actually near zero; with only one or two exceptions, the Iraqis only killed Americans who went to Iraq to conquer them or to help their conquerors. By contrast, all of the Iraqis killed by the Americans were innocent of aggression at the time.
Furthering the power inequality that made the 2003 US conquest of Iraq more a one-sided massacre than a war was the fact that Iraq was under UN discipline at the time. To complete the metaphor then, the US troops were not only in the position of one who agrees to help the most powerful and dangerous actor to attack the weak and helpless actor, but that weak and helpless actor had his arms held by the UN at the time. Iraq would have been terribly weak compared to the US anyway, but Iraq was actually under UN discipline in the form of sanctions and inspections at the time of US's conquest, and was forbidden to have certain types of weapons, including ones that the US did have. Despite this, the UN did not send troops to defend Iraq from the illegal conquest by the US. Nor had the UN defended Iraq from the hundreds of illegal attacks by the US in prior years. The UN's role was like that of a prison warden who legally disarms and weakens his prisoners, and then illegally allows armed criminals from outside the prison to come into the prison to kill his prisoners in their weakened state.
