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下らないが記録に留めよ！米NYT：藪猿バグダッド猿芝居の朝日似非紳士向けと思しき本家「御用」報道例
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/international/27CND-BUSH.html?
PHOTO: Agence France-Presse
President Bush told the troops that the United States would not back down in the face of stern resistance in Iraq.
November 27, 2003
President Travels to Baghdad and Addresses Soldiers at Airport
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune
WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 -- In a stunning mission conducted under enormous secrecy, President Bush flew into Baghdad today aboard Air Force One to share Thanksgiving dinner with United States officials and several hundred astonished American troops.
His trip -- the first ever to Iraq by an American president -- had been kept a matter of absolute secrecy by the White House, which had said that Mr. Bush was to spend the holiday weekend at his ranch outside Crawford, Tex.
Even his wife, Laura, and his parents, the former President George Bush and his wife, Barbara, who had also come to Crawford, received only a few hours' notice of the trip, officials said later.
The mission was an extraordinary gesture, with scant precedent, and was seen as an effort by Mr. Bush to show the importance he attaches to the embattled United States-led effort to pacify and democratize Iraq.
He told the troops that the United States would not back down in the face of stern resistance in Iraq.
The trip also carried a powerful public relations message, coming on a day when millions of Americans traditionally are at home before their televisions to watch parades or football games.
The presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, speaking on CNN, called the trip "a perfectly executed plan" that would be "one of the major moments in his biography." It would have provided "an incredible thrill" for the Americans, he said.
Mr. Bush was spirited out of Crawford on Wednesday in an unmarked car, without his customary motorcade, and boarded Air Force One, which left under the pretext that it was flying to Washington for maintenance work.
He then flew to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, where a few advisers and a small number of reporters sworn to secrecy awaited him. Boarding a second, identical, airplane, the group then flew on to Baghdad International Airport, arriving around dusk.
The president spent 2 hours 32 minutes in the country before heading back to Crawford, where he was due around daybreak Friday.
About 600 startled soldiers, most of them from the Army's First Armored Division and the 82nd Airborne, had arrived at a heavily guarded hangar at the Baghdad airport under the impression that they would be dining with L. Paul Bremer III, the chief United States administrator there, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of coalition forces in Iraq.
Mr. Bremer told the troops that he was supposed to read a message from the president, but then said that normally "the most senior person" present should read it.
With a barely suppressed grin and almost glazed look on his face, he said, "Let's see if we've got anybody more senior." Mr. Bush then appeared from behind a curtain, wearing a gray army exercise jacket, and strode to the microphone.
The troops jumped to their feet to give him a tremendous cheer, and many held up cameras to snap his picture.
"Thank you," he said, adding with a grin, "I was just looking for a warm meal somewhere." He later helped serve the Thanksgiving meal.
Mr. Bush also met with four members of the Iraqi Governing Council.
The trip must have raised enormous concerns for the president's security team. A DHL cargo plane using the same airport on Saturday was struck in the wing by a shoulder-fired missile, forcing it to make an emergency landing. But such missiles, reliant on visual contact with their targets, are considered ineffective after dark.
"It's not real risky," Don Shepperd, a retired general, said on CNN. "At night, the risk is minimal."
The president's specially outfitted Boeing 747 flew with its lights out, aides said.
The trip, nonetheless, was clearly not free of risk, taking the president into the heart of a country where coalition forces have been the targets of dozens of attacks a day. More than 60 American troops have been killed in hostilities there this month, many of them in helicopter crashes.
The trip underscored the extraordinary ability of this administration to keep even the most dramatic of secrets.
Presidential aides later said Mr. Bush had conceived of the idea five or six weeks ago, but only informed Vice President Dick Cheney, the White House chief of staff Andrew Card, and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, on Wednesday.
Officials said afterward that if word of the trip had leaked out -- even while Air Force One was in the air approaching Baghdad -- the visit would have been canceled.
The president, who at times has been criticized for not responding publicly to the daily news of American casualties in Iraq, told the troops today that the American losses simply strengthened his determination:
"We did not charge hundreds of miles through 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," he said.
"We will prevail," he said. "We will win because our cause is just. We will win because we will stay on the offensive. And we will win because you're part of the finest military ever assembled."
News of the trip came out around noon, Washington time, or 8 p.m. in Baghdad, as Americans prepared to gather around Thanksgiving tables, assuming that their president was doing the same in Texas.
White House officials had given no hint that anything else was happening.
"The president will be spending Thanksgiving at his ranch here in Crawford, Tex.," a White House spokesman, Claire Buchan, said Wednesday. "He'll be joined by family and friends, including his mother and father, former President Bush and Mrs. Bush."
She even announced the menu, starting with "free-range turkey" and ending with "Prairie Chapel pecan pie made with pecans from the president's ranch."
She added, apparently unaware herself of the impending trip, "If there are updates, additionally, to what he does on Thanksgiving, we'll try and keep you posted."
The president's father had visited American troops at a desert outpost in Saudi Arabia on Thanksgiving Day in 1990, during the coalition buildup ahead of the first Gulf War. He was the first American president to visit a front-line area since President Richard Nixon visited Vietnam in 1969.
The younger Mr. Bush had earlier shown a flair for the dramatic gesture.
On May 1, wearing a flight suit, he piloted a navy S-3B Viking jet and landed on the deck of the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, off the California coast.
There, in a scene since made controversial by the continued violence in Iraq, he stood before a banner that read "Mission Accomplished" and asserted that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."
Among earlier presidential trips to war zones were those of Dwight David Eisenhower, then president-elect, to Korean battle fronts in December 1952; trips to Vietnam by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966 and 1967; a 1969 visit with troops south of Saigon by President Richard Nixon; and President Bill Clinton's 1999 meeting with Kosovar refugees and NATO military personnel in Macedonia.
Other dramatic wartime missions included President Franklin D. Roosevelt's meeting on Aug. 8, 1941, with Winston Churchill aboard the H.M.S. Prince of Wales, in waters off Newfoundland; and Roosevelt's 1943 meeting in Tehran with Churchill and Stalin.
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