>And on what grounds do you call him a coward?
Failure to take action to protect humanity against evil = a policy of suicide. By adopting a policy of suicide and by gambling on, and accepting to have a WMD attack on it's own people before taking action = a cowardly approach to international peace and security. A policy that others do not wish nor can afford to follow, so now those who have failed in their responsibilities like Canada, France and Germany who I like to call the Axis of Cowards along with the U.N. are now irrelevant and cannot be trusted when it comes to a sovran nations security.
The exact same thing happened in the 1930's with Hitler and Mussolini, back then it was called the League of Nations that was created after WWI, that same League of Nations was destroyed when the international body refused to confront evil in the forms of Hitler and Mussolini. Later that evil presented itself in the form of Idi Amin, Ceausescu, 'Baby Doc' Duvalier to name a few, and the same thing is happening today with the likes Saddam Hussein and a few others. In the last century, nazi, communist and totalitarian dictators alone killed over 100 million people.
But now after 911 we live in a brand new world where we are the target and the weapons of choice are those of mass destruction and where appeasement to evil by proxy is no longer acceptable. Wether we like it or not there is now one obvious certitude, that failure to take action now will only lead to untold atrocities by weapons of mass destruction in the near future. The longer we wait the more certain the danger, it no longer becomes a question of 'if' but 'when'.
The actions required in this new world to confront this evil now falls to those that are courageous enough to confront it and to those that are to coward do to anything about it. Today we are seeing who is Willing and who is Irrelevant.
PEACE
I always find it funny when people talk about peace but don't really know what peace really means. The peace that they are looking for is peace of mind and has nothing to do with international security. Here are a few examples of Peace.
President Lincoln could have had peace easily, saving 500,000 American lives. He could have done that by ordering U.S. troops from Fort Sumter and allowing South Carolina and any other state to secede from the Union. And there would have been peace.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt could have had peace if on the morning of December 8, 1941 he would have asked Congress, not for a Declaration of War, but for a Declaration of Accommodation with the Axis powers, as an Asian and European War would not be worth the death of one more American. And we would have had peace.
In 1991 president Bush could have had peace by allowing Sadam Hussein to keep his troops in Kuwait and to allow him entry into Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Oman. And there would have been peace.
In all cases there would have been the peace of the slave for the many, the peace of the master for the few, and the peace of the grave for the rest.
How much we forget.
At the end of 1940 Roosevelt declared that America must become "the great arsenal of democracy" to economically aid the Allies against the Fascists' (terrorist, evil) warfare. America had been founded on the first two freedoms of religion and speech. Roosevelt's response to the Depression and World War II was to call for freedom from want and freedom from fear. Not only did he believe that all Americans deserved these rights, but also everyone in the world. Roosevelt said that freedom from want "means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peace time life for its inhabitants -everywhere in the world," and freedom from fear "means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation (or terrorist organization) will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor - anywhere in the world."
To all those who cry PEACE I ask you two questions. Are you willing to bet on your life that a terrorist attack via proxy from a terrorist country will not happen, and if an attack does happen are you willing to kill yourself for being wrong. If your answer is NO!!! then the fact is that you are willing to gamble on mine. How many lives would it take before you change your mind...... 3000 or 100,000 or how bout a Million+ are you willing to give peace a change to see ? are you willing to go and see every family who was killed by a terrorist attack and say "sorry" I wanted to give peace a chance ???
The other question is this. Since you want peace and choose not to confront evil, are you willing to view video of 200,000 men, women and children that were tortured in the most inhumane ways, killed, brutally raped, gassed and starved to death, since that is what would happen because of peace.