We need a candidate that can defeat a war-time President, they say.

Some people - mostly from the Kerry camp - are saying that we need to elect a President with military experience. They say a novice like Howard Dean cannot compete with a war-time President like George W. Bush. Now, I’m not entirely sure how Bush is a war-time President - it can’t be that the US has armed forces abroad, because nobody said Clinton was a war-time President, and the US troops he sent to Kosovo are still there. It could be that the term refers to the occupation / peace-keeping operations in Iraq, which puzzles me slightly because I remember Bush saying that major combat operations were over.

(If we’re saying that, because Bush went to war when he shouldn’t have, and because of the failure of his policies our soldiers are still in Iraq being shot at, we need to elect someone who knows what war is about, that sounds silly to me. Either Bush’s war was good, in which case we should re-elect him, or it wasn’t, and we should elect someone who can stop it. The Algerian, Indochina and Vietnam wars were all stopped by politicians, as I recall from my brief readings of history, not by generals.)

Or the phrase might refer to the so-called war on terrorism, in which case this showing off of military experience is laughable in the extreme. So you’re a veteran of Vietnam, or you waged an air war in Kosovo. What does that have to do with a Saudi religious fanatic who has just flown in from Afghanistan to Hamburg to assemble a group of people who will kidnap a plane in Boston to fly it into the World Trade Center in New York? Can you stop him with a tank, a bomber or a gunboat?

Global organised terrorism is a major threat, and one we need to deal with. But we can’t just throw bombs at guys with beards in civilian apartments all over the world. This is not a conventional war. Winning it does not axiomatically require experience of previous wars.