This article in the Age newspaper

http://www.theage.com.au/world/deadly-reapers-stalk-their-quarry-over-afghan-skies-20090323-97es.html

prompts me to ask the following question, what really is a “cowardly attack“?

We hear the term used often and in bold print, “Sri Lanka vows ‘cowardly attack’ will not affect Pakistan relations” or “Cowardly attack will not derail process - Brown” and “U.S. Seeks Culprits Behind Cole Attack ... we track down the individuals responsible for this...cowardly attack," defense secretary William Cohen said.”

Quite possibly a case could be made that all of these incidents had an element of cowardness in them. However the attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers did involve exchanges of gunfire with armed police, the Northern Ireland episode was an attack on an army base and the USS Cole assault was a highly armed warship in which the attackers blew themselves up.

Last year approximately 7000 Taliban were said to have perished, most of those from munitions from the sky. These were delivered primarily by jet pilots whose greatest threats come from their own side. They are not opposed by any enemy airforce and few weapons used by the Taliban are capable of reaching them even at relatively low levels. Admittedly there is the risk of capture after mechanical malfunctions or such like.

However the Reaper crews discussed in The Age article sit in “darkened control rooms” “12,000 kilometres away” where the “most dangerous part of their day is the drive between the base and their homes”. “It is, quite simply, the most risk-free form of combat”.

So I am wondering what needs to be present for an attack to be deemed cowardly? Is the risk to the attacker relevant? Is the military status of the victims the key? Or is it primarily the nature of the attack itself?

The Northern Ireland attacks seemed cowardly to me, two army personnel shot dead whilst receiving delivered pizza. Very brave.

A couple of days later Police were responding to an emergency call (hoax?) and attacked by the IRA, a father of three executed. Shot from behind, an apt example of cowardly.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/world/europe/11ireland.html

Hey Rojo,

This is what I am keen to explore. Does the fact that the soldiers were collecting pizzas make the attack more cowardly in your eyes? If so why? Does the fact that the policeman was shot from behind add to the cowardness quota? Would a sniper shot from a distance be more or less cowardly? The potential risk to the perpetrator is lessened with distance. Does this influence our judgement of the act? If so how do we then judge the Raptor 'pilots'?

Or ultimately is the determining factor whose side you are on?

I'd have thought the use of the term "cowardly attack" is a way of turning public opinion against an opponent which may or may not be deserving of the description - in essence it is a political act.

Often whether or not the claim is true is incidental to the claimant.

'Cowardly' in the term you're referring is from the POV of the recipient which generally means 'an effective attack without immediate recourse which shone light on our weakness'.

From the deliverer it's smart.

Why should I give up on smarts, technology, or sneakiness just to give the enemy an equal chance at killing me?. That's how the British generals of old thought and needlessly cost the lives of many through history.

If you had a baseball bat in your hand and you found yourself behind an intruder in your house late at night who was holding a knife, what would you do?. Tap him on the shoulder, or take advantage of a hole in his defences?.

There IS no such thing as a cowardly attack. There is only effective, or ineffective.

StG,

What you say is true when there are two protagonists fighting over the same thing, where it's a battle to the death.

But what about the situation of a terrorist bombing, for example, where innocent people who wouldn't lift a finger against anyone get killed? It may not exactly be true for them to call it a cowardly attack but certainly understandable when looking at things from their POV.

Yes, the attack is effective but also disproportionate and therefore unjust. In that case, the political use of the term "cowardly attack" is justified.

There's nothing cowardly about strapping a bomb to your body and wandering into a market and blowing all and sundry into spray. IT's most definitely morally reprehensible, but cowardly?, not IMO. It's also smart.

The idea behind suicide bombings is to install fear into the people and force the government (or whoever) into capitulating to whatever demands the attackers might have. Through history it has been an effective way for agenda driven psycho's to go against a mightier power where otherwise they wouldn't have stood a chance.

I understand what you're getting at, and I don't disagree. But in a fight like that the population for the terrorists are another tool, for the government they are collateral damage for whatever reason the two are fighting.

Looking at it from another angle, sitting in a darkened control room thousands of miles away and raining down bombs and missiles on your enemy can hardly be considered brave can it.

It might be interesting if we look at what constitutes a 'brave attack'. Surely it must involve some risk to the attacker. Could the Raptor pilots ever be deemed to have made a 'brave attack'? I wouldn't have thought so.

Cowardly behaviour in a time of conflict is normally assigned to those who run away rather than those attacking.

There seems to be an instinctive response by many to the idea that the less the risk the less brave an action moving toward cowardly if the balance is too disproportionate. For instance many would regard the shooting of unarmed prisoners of war as cowardly.

However the prisoners clearly are not innocent. Is innocence of the victims the main issue as proposed by a poster?

How should the following from Wikipedia be regarded? "On July 22, 2002, the Israeli Defense Forces targeted the building in which Shahade was hiding using a one ton bomb dropped by a F-16 plane in a densely populated neighbourhood of Gaza City. 15 people were killed, including Shahade, his wife and 9 children. 50 others required medical attention as a result of the attack."

A brave or cowardly attack? Or just the business of war?

After the World Trade Center attack in New York, Anthony Mundine got pilloried in the Australian media for saying that it just was a consequence of God's Laws. He also may have said that the terrorists were not cowards (or did that only happen in the US Congress?)

Mundine was instinctively denounced in a rather populist way because he was seen to be on the wrong side.

I think that, like any definition, the idea of what is and isn't seen to be cowardly changes with the times and circumstances. Strictly speaking, being cowardly is the state of mind of the person carrying out the action in question. So, unless you are that person or know him/her well, you can't legitimately make a judgement.

I suppose what the victims and their supporters are really saying is that if they did what the aggressors did, they would be cowards. It could also be that the idea of being cowardly is old baggage from a bygone era that once had a kernel of truth to it.

I also remember the term 'Freedom Fries' when the French had the wherewithal to tell stampeding fruitloops in the whitehouse to shove his attack on Iraq up his coight.

Were the French (and many others) cowards, or smart?.

What really is a cowardly attack?

That's a difficult question. I guess it depends on
the circumstances involved. And from whose perspective
you look at the situation. Many thought that the
people flying those planes into the twin-towers in
New York (9/11) were cowards. However I tend to agree
with one version that I read on the web - which said
that it takes "balls," to do what they did - knowing
they were going to die. They were enemies of America
there's no denying that - but "cowards?" I don't think
so.

I would consider a "cowardly attack," several men mugging
a lone girl in an alley way as "cowardly."
Or that NSW Granny killer who went into an elderly woman's
house at night and toatally brutalised her. That to me is
"cowardly."
Or even opportunistic robbers looking for vulnerable people
as cowards. Or a group of teenagers setting a homeless man
alight.

But that's only my opinion.

There seems to be a majority here who would say that a suicide bomber doesn't logically qualify as a coward.

Why then are these attacks generally referred to as cowardly? Might it be that the reference is toward the planners, those who order the attack but keep themselves removed from danger and death?

How do we then view the commanding officers of the Raptor 'pilots'?

The idea that the notion of cowardness is a bygone relic of a different age is interesting. Possibly it went when chivalry was lost to modern warfare. Might we say that in StG's world chivalry would be a stupid luxury? Little chance of returning a dropped sword, or mercy to a brave enemy because they had earned it.

Perhaps the change is more recent than that. I remember when to kick a person after he was down was certainly frowned upon. Now it seems almost obligatory in a fight and often boasted about.

Back to the Raptor pilots, there seems to be some agreement that their actions could not be regarded as brave, but are they acting cowardly? I am going to admit this was my first thought. I was probably looking for a reasoned argument why I shouldn’t think this way. I know an answer might well be that I am cowardly for thinking that combatants of an ally must needlessly place themselves in harms way to fulfil an outmoded notion of a combat ethic. But I cannot shake a very real sense of disquiet about this form of warfare and if an enemy were to claim this as a cowardly form of fighting I would, at this stage, have to wholeheartedly agree.

Dear csteele,

Whether you're behind a desk in Washington
giving orders, or a pilot causing human
carnage at the press of a button - you're
somehow distant - from the end result of the
consequences of your actions. You don't
actually get the full impact of what you're
doing unless you're there "on the ground,"
so to speak - or amongst the action.

I wonder how the pilots would have felt -
who pressed the buttons to drop the atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - were they
to actually go down on the ground and see for themsleves
the results of what they had done. Would they feel
that they were heroes?

Just a thought.

csteele ~ Yeah whatever, infer what you will about me but get back to me and your chivalry when someone's trying to kill your family. War isn't romantic, neither is killing, it's about shooting someone in the face, it's about dismembering bodies with high explosives, it's about beating someone's skull in with your helmet who's trying to gouge out your eyes with their thumbs.

The best time to attack?, yeah when they can't kill you on the way in. It's war, it's simple. Kill, or die, and do it the most efficient way possible. It's not MY world, it's the real world. Check it out some time.

...and while we're at it, if you're gonna call UAV pilots cowards, call what they fly by the right name. The Raptor is the F-22.

...it's a manned aircraft.

In my first comment I gave my opinion on your 'cowardly act' theory. It hasn't changed.

Hey chill StG, perhaps I should have used the words ‘the world you describe’, it wasn’t any inference about yourself since I had actually assumed you were over-hyping the cynicism to make a point which read quite well. That may not have been the case but I still take the point about there being no such thing as a cowardly attack. I also like RobP’s point “being cowardly is the state of mind of the person carrying out the action in question. So, unless you are that person or know him/her well, you can't legitimately make a judgement”.

And you are perfectly correct I had used the term Raptors instead of Reapers, apologies to Raptor pilots.

However a little reality check of my own. The Taliban are not trying to kill my family, nor might I surmise yours. Nor are they trying to kill the families of the Reaper pilots. The Taliban are also not trying to kill me, you, or the Reaper pilots, nor are they trying to gouge our eyes out.

But Taliban families are dying in this conflict as ‘collateral damage’.

The Taliban do though want the Western forces out of their country.

We are entering a different realm with this technology. Foxy noted that there are always those well away from the action giving orders but there has been till now at least some of the attacking country’s citizens are putting their lives at risk to complete an action.

This however seems like a total disconnect which it virtually (so to speak) is. Is acceptable to fight conflicts in this manner? We have rules of war and some things are not permitted, my feeling is that we should consider that the use of unmanned, armed and lethal drones should probably be included.

Furthermore from my reading there appear to have been trials of autonomous robotic fighting weaponry in IRAQ. This is what the future holds, it may well be the time to have the discussion on what is acceptable now before we get much further down the track.

csteele,
I definately see where you're coming from, and it almost invariably depends on which side of the fence you sit upon.
My view on soldiers being killed in N.I. is that following a decade of "peace" and seemingly stable govt steered by both sides of the political spectrum the soldiers should have had little to fear. A full on invasion of the barracks would have been brave, a drive by shooting of unsuspecting targets ( I think the delivery men were injured too) much less so.

The other scenarios depicted are at least on a war footing. It wasn't so a few weeks ago in N.I.

Rojo,

I accept the point you have made about the Northern Ireland situation when you say that given the political climate in that country the unsuspecting nature of the attack might be regarded as cowardly. If the same incident had of occurred at the height of the troubles then I think you are saying you would have had seen it as less so.

Though I'm not sure that "a full on invasion of the barracks" might have negated that if it was also unexpected.

I think we are still judging an element of potential danger to the attacker as being important. The less suspecting the victim the more effective the attack and therefore the less risk to the attacker.

I also acknowledge the point about it depending which side of the fence you are sitting on. I remember a discussion with relatives prior to the invasion of Iraq of ‘human shields’, westerners who had gone to that country to stand at infrastructure sites like water treatment plants, bridges, factories etc. These were assumed to be targets of a pre-emptive nature to be taken out to hamper even in a small way the Iraqi armed forces. In fact the whole justification for the war hinged on the notion of a pre-emptive strike.

I posed the question how might the blowing up of the Sydney Harbour Bridge by an Iraqi team be regarded, note this was after Australia had agreed to be part of the ‘coalition of the willing‘. The overwhelming response was that it would be a ’cowardly terrorist attack’.

It would seem that except for Foxy’s more crime orientated examples the notion of a ‘cowardly attack’ in times of conflict may be far less self evident than the media and our leaders would have us believe.

Without getting tangled up in too many examples, or the politics, to my mind a "cowardly attack" is one where the victim has neither the awareness nor ability to defend themselves.
A soldier has that awareness, and if he doesn't that's bad training.
Those in the twin-towers had neither, and no matter the guts of those about to die, the victims, including the passengers, were subjected to a cowardly act.
As for suicide bombers, if they strike a military/police target, it's not cowardly, the victims know they are under threat, and should be expected to stay alert. If they strike civilians, that's a cowards act.
The Palestinians know full well that Hamas is launching rocket attacks from their midst, if they don't want to be hit by the Israelis, the choice is their own, stop Hamas themselves, or get the H out of there. They had the awareness, so have no right to complain, in my opinion.
The civilian victims in Afghanistan are slightly different, they have no reasonable hope of evicting the Taliban, and fleeing isn't a realistic option either, it's a tribal society and the Taliban will violently punish them or their relatives, so I would call the un-manned strikes that kill them as cowardly. JMO.

Apart from the last post we seem to have overlooked the fact unarmed victims are the target.
Every time non combatants unarmed, are those meant to be butchered.
And can we look at those who kill themselves while committing these crimes against humanity?
They unfortunately do not see the act as death, but the start of a perfect life.
They truly do not have the same view of death as us, are in fact brain washed, can any one say that is bravery?
And the thread of blame every thing on America is here to see, yet how do we say that about Bali?
As Pakistan readys for the explosion that surely is coming, we may see more of these brave murderers act here.
Sorry but no hero's kill innocents, they are not cowards? well they are not hero's and maybe not quite human.

csteele, my lameish point about "barracks invasion" was more along the lines about risk to the shooters. very little risk firing from a distance with planned escape route and ability to abort at a moments notice.

With a IRA ceasefire in place for a decade or so prior to these events, perhaps the fairest thing to do was declare it over so that the army could put themselves back on full alert. Two soldiers who more than likely had nothing to do with past troubles, were killed. And I'm not sure for what "benefit".

cheers

It takes courage to live.
It takes even more courage to live while letting others live as well.
It takes even further courage to live while letting others do as they want.

Yes, it takes a little courage to blow oneself up with the others - but not as much courage as letting them live and respecting their free will and being different.

So this is what renders those acts as relatively cowardly.

Maximillion,

How you view the attack on the Pentagon that also occurred on 9/11? Certainly a military target but one that also claimed the lives of innocent victims. I suppose I'm looking for a clarification of what circumstances we accept 'collateral damage' (read extreme violence against civilians) as part of the price for achieving the objectives of an attack before we call it cowardly?

I have a little more difficulty with your Hamas call. I'm not sure how much opportunity Gazan residents have to get themselves out of Gaza and why can't the same asked of those Israelis living within range of the rockets coming from Gaza? Indeed can't your sentence could just as easily read "The Israelis know full well that their government is launching attacks from their country, if they don't want to be hit by the Hama rockets, the choice is their own, stop their government themselves, or get the H out of there. They had the awareness, so have no right to complain, in my opinion."

When you say "A soldier has that awareness, and if he doesn't that's bad training." do you have any sympathy for Rojo's position that the soldiers who were the victims of the Real IRA shootings would have had little awareness of danger after 10 years of peace?

Yuyutsu
Except for your reference to blowing oneself up your missive may just as well be a plea to leave the Afghanis alone. Remember it is our counties that have invaded theirs not the other way round.

I think to have any validity a true definition of a 'cowardly attack' should be able to be applied equally irrespective of the participants.

Csteele, simply put, ALL the plane attacks I would classify as cowardly, as defined in my post.
Hamas- Since the Israeli attacks were in response to Hamas repeatedly breaking cease-fire agreements, and sending rockets at civilians at random, I don't feel you can legitimately flip my statement. The Israeli's were attacking the attackers, and the surrounding population knew EXACTLY what was coming, the Israelis published the fact well in advance. The Hamas terrorists are the sons, fathers, brothers etc of the victims, not a separate force, it was up to those they claim to be fighting for to deal with them. As for getting themselves out of Gaza, well, they all knew where the attacks would come, how hard would it have been just to walk away, to put some distance between themselves and the targets? They chose to think the Israelis wouldn't pay them in the same coin they had been spending, their mistake. And they've paid for it.
NI- While it is a valid question, it still goes to the fact that they were there for a reason, and while the pizza guys were innocent victims, those officers should have been aware of the potential, training remember. To say that someone on guard should not be expected to be on guard rather defeats the purpose of having a guard, doesn't it?
Collateral damage- to be honest, I find this one as difficult as most people. It happens, that's a fact of conflict, but as to the what, how, who, right or wrong etc, I have no simple answers. Does anyone? Even in the days of fixed battlefields there was never a time when the civilian population didn't suffer thus, or make handy victims. I have no idea how it could be reasonably prevented, short of packing all contestants off to fight on the moon.
Now wouldn't that be nice? Peace on Earth might actually mean something then, lol.

I think Maximillion we are going to have to agree to disagree on the Gaza issue. As to whom broke the ceasefire may not be cut and dry but as this article in the Guardian reports it would cast some doubt on the justification of laying the blame at the feet of Hamas.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/05/israelandthepalestinians

But the argument I find most intriguing is “The Hamas terrorists are the sons, fathers, brothers etc of the victims, not a separate force, it was up to those they claim to be fighting for to deal with them.” Well they did deal with them by electing them. As a result there was a ceasefire that a cynical person might think only collapsed because and Israeli election was coming up and some chest thumping was needed.

Might not this argument lead to a justification of the bombing campaign of Israeli late night cafés? Each Israeli citizen in my understanding has had compulsory military training and these establishments were frequented mainly by those of serving age. When the bombings were occurring I remember thinking these were cowardly attacks. But if I were to adopt the above position then I might take a different view.

Back to our unmanned drones. The latest attack in Pakistan on the police academy was due to their use, "We claim responsibility for the attack. This was in retaliation to the ongoing drone attacks in the tribal areas. There will be more such attacks," Mehsud, the Pakistan Taliban leader.

These weapons have been in use for a number of years,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article5762371.ece

Despite the Pakistani government’s resistance.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_PAKISTAN_STRIKES?SITE=AZTUC&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2009-03-18-12-18-29

Now it appears they want them for themselves.

And on it goes. I’m not sure your rocketship to the moon is going to fit them all in, but a nice thought none-the-less.

"As for getting themselves out of Gaza, well, they all knew where the attacks would come, how hard would it have been just to walk away, to put some distance between themselves and the targets? They chose to think the Israelis wouldn't pay them in the same coin they had been spending, their mistake. And they've paid for it."

Maximilion,

That's a pretty harsh assessment. I think it's fair to say that the average Gazan has a dislike for Israel, but is not sufficient to warrant a death sentence. Unfortunately the ordinary Gazans are the meat in the sandwich between the Israelis and the heavyweights in the Arab world. Really, the Gazans on their own are a very small threat to Israel. The problem is that they have been politically infiltrated and overrun by Hamas.

Have a look at how small Gaza is on a map - there are 1.5 million people crammed into it and they can hardly go anywhere, especially with Israel and Egypt manning the border crossings. They can't use a lot of the tunnels now either as they have been bombed.

You'll find that, no matter where you go, ordinary people are just that, ordinary. The politics is played to a much higher level by the elites and the activists like Hamas that support them. If you want to blame anyone, blame them for much of the conflict.