BUSH WASN'T EVEN A FIGHTING DRUNK!
by Tony Parsons

GEORGE Dubya Bush says that Iraq is just like Vietnam - but how would he know?

When he had a chance to fight for his country in Vietnam he chose to lay on the floor of a bar in Dallas sucking on a bottle of tequila instead. It was a long way from Saigon.

Bush was the right age for Vietnam, but he ducked the call to arms by signing on for the soft option of the stay-at-home National Guard. Or was it the Mouseketeers?

We are cursed by a generation of leaders who have never heard a shot fired in anger. And that, more than anything, has made Iraq possible.

Would Bush have been so gung-ho about invading Iraq if he had, seen the reality of war in Vietnam, instead of the unreality of happy hour in downtown Houston?

Would Tony Blair have been so keen on sending other people's sons off to fight if he had actually seen a man die?

My father, an old soldier, was totally against the Falklands War. My old man was no pacifist, but he had some understanding of what it would cost to get those South Atlantic rocks back.

"Let the Argentinians have the Falklands," he said. "Let them have the sheep, too, and do with them what they will."

Maggie Thatcher had no idea what the Falklands would cost. She had no concept of what it would be like when men were dying in Goose Green, or burning alive on the lower decks of HMS Sheffield.

Denis Healey could have told her. Or Ted Heath. Or my dad. They were from a generation who had fought a war. But that generation is dying out and we are all the poorer for it.

Thatcher never got closer to combat than watching The Bridge On The River Kwai on a Sunday afternoon. Like Blair and Bush, it was easy for her to send somebody else's son off to fight and maybe die because she knew not what she did.

Bush is right, of course. Iraq does resemble Vietnam in the sense that a one-sided military engagement turned into an unpopular war and then an unwinnable one.

America chose Vietnam to make a stand against Communism, and Iraq to make a stand against al-Qaeda - even though there was no link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda until Bush and Blair created one.

But what do we expect? Unlike John F Kennedy, or Churchill, or indeed my old man, they have no idea of the reality of war.

Bush the drunk, Blair the lawyer - what do these pampered men know about anything apart from their own privileged little worlds?

There is no solution to the problem. For the developed world, the horrors of war are receding into the history books. My parents are dead. Their generation is almost gone. Those of us who are left have peace that they fought for, and we should always be grateful for that.

But it does mean that we have a Prime Minister who, at an age when previous generations were in uniform, was practising the chords to Honky Tonk Women.

Good luck to him. I am from that mollycoddled, born-at-the-right-time generation, too.

But how can a spoilt baby boomer like Blair make decisions about when to go to war? Little wonder he can't even look the loved ones of our dead soldiers in the eye.

And Bush is even worse. The leader of the western world had a chance to fight for his country and chose to crawl into a bottle.

Men who have known nothing but peace cannot possibly be effective war leaders.

Bush and Blair are men who never wore a uniform apart from a blue suit and tie. No wonder they got us into this mess.

Apparently, Hollywood is planning a film of Dubya's experience at the time of the Vietnam War - Full Dinner Jacket.