Terrorists are cowards and I’m going to tell you why. Recent acts of terror, like the string of bombings which targeted candidates in Iraq’s March election, have made me think about a lot things.  Mostly they’ve made me think back to, of all things, my younger days growing up and playing war games with my best friend.  Back in those simpler days, our backyards became every battlefield we had ever heard of from Gettysburg to Normandy to Da Nang.  We played war games every chance we got. I visited my friend recently, and — in commemoration of our past war game exploits —we rehashed our old battles.  However, instead of lining up in the backyard face-to-face like we used to, we sat in separate rooms.  Our method of combat was to send each other text messages, telling each other what we would do without actually ever doing anything. Occasionally, we would claim that one of the cats in the house had a bomb inside of it, which sent the whole household into a finger-pointing frenzy; no one knew who to trust or when it was safe to get a drink from the fridge. Our new war games, though, were a satire of how contemporary war is fought. Thousands of years of human evolution have brought us from fighting each other in hand-to-hand combat, to shooting each other to dropping bombs to the most cowardly of all strategies: terrorism. Our American and coalition forces in the Middle East are fighting unseen, cowardly enemies who play the game of war from hidden bunkers and unreachable rooftops.  Almost daily, terrorists bomb roads, schools, buses — anything they believe will scare us. Their strategy is to invoke terror without showing their face, like a schoolyard bully throwing rocks from the safety of a high tree branch.  If those terrorists were to come out and try to attack us upfront, we would send them running for the hills.  If they had any courage at all, terrorist leaders wouldn’t send audio tapes from some bunker buried in the desert.  If they had an ounce of courage, they would come right out in the open and say: “Here we are, come get us!”  Instead they cowardly bomb marketplaces and buses. If those terrorists who think they can keep us down had any courage at all, they wouldn’t need elaborate stories about martyrdom ending with 40 virgins in heaven to convince their fighters to attack. They think that if they can just keep attacking us — while hiding themselves from any repercussions — eventually we’ll just pack up and go home. Boy, they’re wrong. Our brave soldiers are at war with radicals.  Radicals who think they can get the best of us and win this war just because we can’t find them.  These people are nothing more than cowards living in a delusional world, believing they are courageous because they play the game with the “bravery” of being out of range.