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News :: Regime |
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The Turkey Has Landed |
Current rating: 0 |
by Phil Reeves and David Usborne
(No verified email address) |
27 Nov 2003
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The administration will be hoping that the video images will help erase memories of a not dissimilar staged event on 1 May in which the President landed on an American aircraft carrier to announce that the war in Iraq had been won.
Said one Iraqi on hearing of Bush's visit, "He is another Mongol in a line of invaders who have destroyed Iraq." |
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Hunting the dodgy Republican bird
28 November 2003
George Bush delivered a dramatic Thanksgiving Day surprise last night by flying, under cover of darkness, into Iraq on board Air Force One.
Two hundred and ten days after declaring an end to major combat, President Bush slipped into the unstable and dangerous Middle Eastern country that his troops now occupy with the lights on his plane darkened and the windows blacked out.
The extraordinary mission no American president has visited a war zone since Richard Nixon flew to Vietnam in 1969 was clearly calculated to burnish Mr Bush's image as he prepares for a re-election campaign that will be overshadowed by violence in Iraq and the rising toll of American casualties. It was spent with 600 soldiers at a turkey and sweet potato dinner in a mess hall at Baghdad airport and lasted a mere two and a half hours.
Yet it was enough to secure valuable prime-time television coverage on Thanksgiving Day, featuring pictures of a determined president rallying his troops after a grim month in which 70 lives have been lost. The operation was surrounded in extraordinary secrecy, and was known beforehand only to a handful of the President's closest aides. The White House communications director, Dan Bartlett, told a group of hand-picked reporters invited on the flight and sworn to secrecy that "if this breaks while we are in the air, we're turning around".
Even Laura Bush, the President's wife, was reportedly kept out of the loop until the last moment. In a deft stroke of misinformation, the White House had said that President Bush would be eating Thanksgiving Day dinner at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and even released details of the menu.
His parents, George and Barbara Bush, travelled there expecting to see him. Instead, unknown even to secret service agents guarding his Texas ranch, Mr Bush flew back to Washington DC from Texas on Wednesday evening to begin the clandestine flight to Baghdad.
It was a moment of extraordinary political theatre as Paul Bremer, the top US official in Iraq, told troops he had a Thanksgiving message from the President and that the most "senior" US official among them should be the one to read it. Turning toward the stage backdrop, Bremer asked: "Is there anyone back there who's more senior than us?"
Enter Mr Bush. "I was just looking for a warm meal somewhere thanks for inviting me to dinner," the President, wearing a coy smile and with tears in his eyes, told the soldiers.
In spectacular vote-winning form, he posed with a platter of roast turkey. And for 10 minutes he dished out mashed potatoes and corn to the the 1st Armoured Division and the 82nd Airborne Division.
News of the visit only broke in the US after Air Force One had taken off from Baghdad and was on its way home. And no sooner was the visit made public in Baghdad, than the city was shaken by the sounds of conflict repeated loud explosions, gunfire and ambulance sirens.
The administration will be hoping that the video images will help erase memories of a not dissimilar staged event on 1 May in which the President landed on an American aircraft carrier to announce that the war in Iraq had been won. As the violence has worsened, that day has come to haunt the White House. This time, wearing a US army jacket, he told the troops that America "stands solidly" behind them, and to whoops of approval that the US military was doing a "fantastic job".
As well as potatoes, he also served them, and the television cameras, with a portion of his familiar "war on terror" rhetoric. "You are defeating the terrorists here in Iraq," he said, "so we don't have to face them in our own country."
Not that the mere fact of the President having spent two and a half hours in Iraq is likely to do anything to change events in Iraq or curb the violence there. Nearly 300 US services personnel have died in hostile action, 183 of them since 1 May when Mr Bush declared an end to major combat.
More than 60 US troops were killed by hostile fire in November, more than any other month since the end of major combat. But it was a bold and meticulously orchestrated gesture that will have no political downside. Mr Bush will also have artfully upstaged Senator Hillary Clinton who is due to visit the Iraq capital this morning. "You are defending the American people from danger and we are grateful," he told the soldiers.
The visit came during a lull in the violence, which may have been linked to the Muslim Eid-al-Fitr holiday. Some Iraqis were unimpressed. "To hell with Bush," said Mohammed al-Jubouri. "He is another Mongol in a line of invaders who have destroyed Iraq."
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Bush's Iraq Visit A Pre-Election PR Stunt |
by AFP
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
28 Nov 2003
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"Electoral raid on Baghdad" read the caustic headline in the left-wing Paris daily Liberation which summed up European newspaper editorial reaction to President George W Bush's Thanksgiving Day visit to US troops in Iraq.
The brief visit, arranged in top secrecy, occurred too late for most papers to give it full coverage, and almost all ran the same wire agency photo of Mr Bush, clad in a gray army bomber jacket, carrying a large tray of roast turkey, potatoes and grapes through a crowd of smiling soldiers.
Those which did comment were mostly skeptical of Mr Bush's motives, with the US presidential election now less than 12 months away.
"The turkey has landed," ran the front-page headline in the London daily Independent.
"George Bush becomes the first US president to visit Iraq in order to provide the television pictures required by his re-election campaign," it said, noting that Hillary Rodham Clinton, "his undeclared Democratic opponent," was on her way to Baghdad from Afghanistan.
Liberation noted that more than 430 US soldiers had been killed in Iraq, 184 of them since Bush declared an official end to the war on May 1, and quoted a Gallup opinion poll this month showing that 54 percent of Americans disapproved of the way the post-war situation was being handled.
"Bush knows that Iraq could become the Achilles heel of his campaign," it said.
The conservative London Times also did not run an editorial but its front-page report called the visit "one of the most audacious publicity coups in White House history."
Europe's leading business daily, the London-based Financial Times, used the visit to repeat its call for general elections in Iraq, rather than the US government's "top-down strategy built around favored exiles and a timetable synchronized with President Bush's re-election campaign".
The daily Berliner Zeitung said the visit had two other aims.
"Bush wanted to raise the groggy morale of his troops and at the same time to show Iraqis his determination," it wrote.
In Madrid, the center-right daily El Mundo said the visit was "a publicity stunt which will not solve the problem of Iraq."
The daily Vanguardia, published in Spain's second city Barcelona, said Bush was trying to put a positive gloss on an increasingly difficult situation.
It noted darkly that "George W Bush does not attend the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq, but has dinner in Baghdad with those who dream of coming home alive."
The right-wing La Razon said "Caesar Bush" was exploiting Hollywood machinery to the full to send a message loud and clear to those who doubted the wisdom of his military policies.
In Rome, the daily La Republica described the visit as "a brilliant stage-managed event and a courageous act".
But it said it was also "obviously an electoral blitz, a Hollywood-style stunt of the kind we will see again and again throughout the campaign."
As the Arabic media saw the secrecy of Bush's visit as a sign of weakness amid spiraling violence in Iraq, newspapers in Israel said the stunt was bound to help the US president's ratings in opinion polls that had been falling alarmingly.
"Bush's popularity will undoubtedly go up in opinion polls this week, but on the condition that his army does not face another painful strike," said the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot.
"It is like playing the last $100 dollar bill at the casino," said Maariv in an editorial, adding that "only one thing can ensure victory for Bush at the November 2004 polls: Saddam Hussein dead or chained up."
Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi said the secrecy of the visit, during which the only Iraqis whom Bush encountered were four members of the US-installed Governing Council, showed that Washington was afraid of the Iraqis.
"The US president's sudden visit to Iraq was a sign of the US fear of the Iraqi people," said Mr Kharazi, whose country opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq.
"Bush 'infiltrated' Baghdad for two hours," scoffed the front-page headline of the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat.
In Beirut, Al-Mustaqbal newspaper, owned by Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, announced that "Bush's secret visit to Baghdad opens presidential election season."
A front-page editorial in Lebanon's leading An-Nahar newspaper compared Bush to Roman emperor Julius Caesar, but said the US president could not repeat the phrase: "I came, I saw, I conquered."
The editorial was headlined: "I came, I saw nothing, but I will conquer."
Many newspapers in the Middle East, especially in the Gulf, carried no commentary on the visit which took place as Muslims in the region were still celebrating the Eid al-Fitr holidays which follow the holy month of Ramadan.
© 2003 Agence France-Presse
http://www.afp.com |
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