Only inside the USA could anyone take a choice between the Democrats and the Republicans all that seriously...it's like a choice between Brezhnev's politburo backers and Chernenko's politburo backers would have been in the 70's..."Meet the new boss! Da-da-da-dum! Same as the old boss! Da-da-da-dum!"

And that is probably what will happen in Iraq too. In fact, it is happening on a local basis already. Old despot gone. New despot arrives.

If you call Saddam a "coward", then picture yourself having to hide in holes for 8 months, with a hundred thousand heavily armed people after you, being in all probability totally exhausted, and then being found by those people with nothing but a pistol in your hand.

What are you gonna do? Shoot yourself? Go down in a hail of bullets? How many of YOU would do that, and how many would just give it up at that point and surrender?

All this "coward" talk strikes me as pretty self-serving, because none of you has any idea what it would be like to be in that position. That's my opinion.

Which is not to say that I don't agree he was a vicious dictator. He was.

A lot of Germans were absolutely disgusted in '45 that Hitler went out by suicide, and called him "a coward" for so doing. His real sin was not cowardice, but a complete lack of empathy for what other people were going through on account of his actions.

When dictators lose out, it doesn't matter what they do or how they meet their demise. People call them "cowards". In so doing, they are usually not expressing anything much about the man himself, but rather venting their own hatred, that's all.

Convenient cheap shots. Call him immoral or amoral, call him a ruthless despot, but where do you figure he's a coward? Does a coward hold out in circumstances like that for that many months...or does that require real tenacity? How do tenacity and cowardice add up to be in the breast of the same person?

- LH