"The Japanese risked attacking people similarly armed to themselves, and with considerably greater resources to bring to bear not far down the road...someone who might very likely beat them. That takes guts."

You have got to be kidding - right? It takes absolutely no courage whatsoever to launch a full scale attack on an opponent who does not even expect an attack to take place. It's the equivalent of walking up behind some complete and utter stranger in the street and hitting them over the head with a bottle.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour was a pre-emptive stike. It was an attack unleashed upon an unsuspecting target. Over the target area/area of operations the Japanese had total control of the air, in terms of naval forces after the first attack they had naval superiority in the area. Their attack was based on the Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm attack on the Italian Fleet's base at Taranto but on a far grander scale, which oddly enough I believe was to their disadvantage. If instead of this Japanese pre-emptive strike being planned and executed as a purely naval operation it had contained a landward element, had the initial aerial assaults being followed up by a landing on the islands, Hawaii would have fallen. Then carriers or no, the US would have been effectively hamstrung as far as the war in the Pacific for a considerable time as their only option of "getting at" the enemy would have been through Australia, given of course that that landmass would not have been invaded had Hawaii been in Japanese hands. As things were the vast resources of their enemey (the US) that you mentioned were a twelve months and a few thousand miles away, and even once brought into play the Allied Forces in the Pacific theatre remained very much on the back foot for some time.

The attack by the Israeli Air Force in 1966 was a pre-emptive strike, the league of Arab states who had parked their armies on Israel's borders were taken totally by surprise, they did not for one second expect Israel to act in this way.

On the other hand the invasion of Iraq was telegraphed, the Ba'athist regime were contiually advised on exactly what they had to do and what they had to comply with in order to save themselves, this was done right up until the very last moment.

You describe the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 as being - "an attack on the entire metropolitan civilian infrastructure and the capital city and smaller centres of an entire country...a country which was basically almost incapable of fighting back in any effective manner at the time." That just does not tally up with reality does it? If you think that it does then please explain how civilian casualties for 2003 were one tenth of those for Desert Storm (IraqBodyCount - they confirm casualties from two sources before reporting - they have so far been the most consistantly accurate measure of all casualties in Iraq) . In March 2003 civilian infrastructure was not targeted because the troops entering the country were relying on various lumps of that infrastructure being captured intact. In Desert Storm the objective was to drive the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait, so various lumps of civilian infrastructure was deliberately destroyed in order to prevent Iraqi reinforcements being deployed to the area of operations.

The following "questions" are laughable to anyone who has been involved in "live/hot" situations:

"What kind of guts does it take to fight a war where you normally kill at least a hundred of them for every man you lose?"

Let me remind you of a quotation from one of your heroes little hawk - "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." - George S. Patton.

"Now bear in mind, I am not criticizing the American and British soldiers. No indeed! It always takes some guts to be a soldier and go into combat and quite likely get shot at, even if you do outgun the enemy severely." The norm for launching any sort of attack upon a fully alerted enemy (In this case the Iraqi Army) is that local superiority in numbers has to be established in the ration of 3:1. In short Little Hawk, if you are going to attack someone and you want that attack to go through you will ALWAYS outgun the enemy severely.