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"Their track record in running world governments is no better than men's...."

Another case in point: Benazir Bhutto. Her rampaging vanity helped to facilitate a series of policy disasters for Pakistan.

There is another pernicious fallacy inherent in the article: the idea that armed conflict is always bad. When nations face irreconcilable differences sometimes armed conflict is beneficial. As Clasewitz observed was is "politics by other means". At times war is only way to obtain a desirable political goal.

Margaret Thatcher realized that this was the case in the Flaklands War. There was no strategic British interest at stake over the Falklands but Thatcher went to war because leeting the Argentine agression stand would have brought other undesirable political reults in its wake.

The French had several opportunities to stop Hitler before he became a menace. They failed to act because of their WWI experience. This timidity proved to be their undoing in the long run.