Secret flight of Air Force One

WASHINGTON: President Bush''s secret dash to Iraq was not a spur-of-the-moment decision but a long-planned mission known only to a few select aides.
Not even his wife Laura, and his parents, Barbara and George Bush Sr, who gathered in the family ranch in Crawford, Texas, knew of the impending visit.
Having stuck to his original schedule to go to Crawford for Thanksgiving, Bush left the ranch incognito, wearing a jacket and a baseball cap, in darkness.
He flew to Washington to change planes and pick up some aides, and then headed to Baghdad on a 11-hour non-stop flight that clearly marks a highpoint of his presidency.
The episode stunned his political opponents and domestic critics of his Iraq policy, and they struggled to formulate a response to what obviously was a major PR coup for the President.
Bush was under increasing attack for being unmindful of rising U.S casualties in Iraq and for not attending the funerals of slain soldiers being brought back, almost secretly with no public attention, to the United States.
But in one cloak-and-dagger infused moment, Bush clearly upstaged the criticism and set a new aggressive tone on Iraq, telling stunned soldiers in Baghdad - as much as his domestic critics and Iraqi insurgents - that the US had not come so far to quit and run away when the going gets rough.
"Those who attack our coalition forces and kill innocent Iraqis are testing our will," Bush told cheering troops during his two-and-a-half hour visit.
"We did not charge hundreds of miles into the heart of Iraq, pay a bitter cost of casualties, defeat a ruthless dictator and liberate 25 million people only to retreat before a band of thugs and assassins."
At home, many of Bush''s political opponents acknowledged the masterstroke, but refused to retreat from their criticism of his Iraq policy.
Good of him to go, but the troops should not have been there in the first place, was the sentiment expressed by lead Democratic opponent Howard Dean.
While there was lavish praise for Bush''s Thanksgiving gambit from other constituencies too, few noted that while boosting the morale of American troops, he made no attempt to reach across to Iraqis, who were also celebrating Id at the end of Ramzan.
Although unannounced US Presidential visits are unusual, trips to strife-torn regions are not. Nixon visited Vietnam and Clinton went to Bosnia during war and insurgency.
But Bush''s effort had all his trademark swagger. He refused to fly in an unmarked military plane, and insisted on taking one of the two planes that form the Air Force One fleet.
A British Airways pilot who saw the plane, radioed, asking, "Did I just see Air Force One?" Bush''s pilot tersely lied, "Gulf Stream 5."
The plane, escorted by military jets, made a spiral landing in Baghdad under a fake call sign with the cabin lights shut off. The Air Force One itself is capable of foiling a missile attack, which was one of Washington''s biggest fears had news of the trip leaked out.
In his 152-minutes at a Baghdad Airport camp, he put up a performance that is becoming quite typical, joking with flabbergasted soldiers that he was "just looking for a warm meal somewhere. Thank you for inviting me to dinner".
The US media, and pretty much the whole country, which had shut down for Thanksgiving, almost missed the grand political theatre that unfolded on Thursday.
The 14 reporters who accompanied him on the trip were forbidden from alerting their bosses, employers and families. Their phones were confiscated and they were given new phones when they landed in Baghdad, and told they could break the news only on the flight back.
Calling the visit a defining moment in the Bush Presidency, analysts compared it favourably to two other images from the Bush album - his address to firemen from atop the post 9/11 rubble, and his landing on an aircraft carrier earlier this year to announce the end to the formal Iraq War.