The Nazi regime convinced ordinary people that they had to fight against an internal Jewish threat. That was a lie. If ordinary Germans had let "the other guy" go to war, nothing would have happened because there was no internal threat. Likewise, if Americans had ignored the terrible threat that Iraq posed to the US in 2003, then nothing would have happened: Iraq wasn't a threat to the US. Claims that it was trying to do destroy the US or had the capability to do so were lies. Ignoring the lies is not surrender.
The first rule of honorable war fighting is to figure out which justifications are true and which are lies. A people that can't or won't do that can never be honorable since sooner or later, they'll end up exterminating lots of innocent people in a war based on lies.
As reference: see most of human history.
Also, I dislike sociopathy.
In general, Iraq Body Count is an obscene underestimate of excess deaths. IBC data comes from two sources (1) english language journalist accounts and (2) Iraqi government data. We know that (1) is absurd because when violence increases, deaths increase and reporters' presence on the ground decreases dramatically. If you read journalists' accounts of their own work in Iraq (for example, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran), you'll note that in many cases reporters simply never left the green zone. How could they possibly write stories about killings when they can't leave the green zone? We know that the data from (2) is highly suspect because much of the conflict in Iraq has been sectarian with government death squads engaged in ethnic cleansing. For example, we have evidence showing that when Shiite religious parties took control of the ministry of health after elections, they fired Sunni medical staff and imposed policies restricting the treatment of wounded Shia. If the Shia run ministry of health won't treat Sunni victims, why on Earth should we trust them to faithfully record statistics about how many Sunnis were executed by government death squads? I mean, are we normally so credulous that we accept death counts made by the government accused of making the killings?
From a scientific perspective, IBC's "analysis" is garbage and should be ignored. At the very least, you have no business citing IBC unless you understand enough about IBC's methodological flaws to explain precisely why it can only be considered a gross underestimate.
One part of me gets it how war can be honorable. Thoughts about protection, bravery, planning, cunning, destruction of evil enemy. On the other hand I think that this thoughts are cultural imprintment reinforcing primal instincts embedded by evolutionary means in times way before industrial age.
Concept of honorable war in our heads is with such contradiction with any serious war fought with modern equipment that I feel that it's one of these things that made sense in early days of humanity, like seeing danger in dark barely visible shapes, but unlike those harmless artifacts when mixed with modern technology our glitch that makes us think that war can be sane misguides us into doing really harmful and dangerous things.
I'm guessing that surrendering early might often lead to much less damage than attempting to wage a war against serious opponent.