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.