Small-town Amerrica and Iraq

Driving to school today, I heard a segment on the BBC radio (can't find a link, unfortunately) about the impact of the war in Iraq on small towns in the United States. As it turns out, a significant number of casualties in this war were residents of towns with less than 25,000 inhabitants. The segment featured an interview with residents of one such small town, and one particular interview with the parents of a decased American Marine in Iraq. There were a number of interesting points made during this interview which I found thought-provoking. The interviewees adopted the following propositions:

1) There is the East Coast, the West Coast, and then there is small town America.
2) Kids in small town America not only go to school, they also go to church.
3) People in "that region" started this war, and if we leave the job unfinished, we will be conceding defeat to "those people in that region."

Why are we at war in Iraq? Even taking the administration's most broad justification for the war, it looks something like this: The terrorists attacked us on 9/11, Saddam was a bad guy who we thought had WMD, and there was some possibility that the terrorists and Saddam might co-operate in the future, and that was simply not a risk we were willing to take, since our freedom was at issue. Even on that now thoroughly discredited view, there is no implicit notion that what is at issue in this war is the "way of life of church-going Americans." Here, we see a naked admission of just that, and it is not terribly difficult to infer that many of these people also think this is an essentially religious conflict, between Christianity and Islam.

To the extent that the motivations of the soldiers and their families, their narrative about why they are fighting this war, is incosistent with the purported narrative offered by the Bush administration, what does that mean for this war, and for our nation? Has this happened before in our history?