HOWZAT

President Bush served mashed potatoes in the chow line for ten minutes and then said he had to leave.

Soldiers of the 82nd Airborne and 1st Armoured Division said they were impressed to see the commander in chief flying into Baghdad just days after a cargo plane was struck by a shoulder-fired missile.

“It was a shock,” Private Jason Strickland said.

“It was a display of confidence in our ability to protect not just us, but him,” Private Telo Monahan, 20, of Woodinville, Washington, said. “It was just three or four days after that DHL plane got hit.”

Aware of the grim news from the Iraqi front after the coalition’s bloodiest month since he confidently declared victory in a similar stunt on a US aircraft carrier in May, Mr Bush delivered a pep talk to boost his troops’ sometimes flagging morale. “You are engaged in a difficult mission. Those who attack our coalition forces and kill innocent Iraqis are testing our will. They hope we will run,” he said.

“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 declared, drawing a standing ovation from the cheering soldiers.

“We will prevail. We will win because our cause is just. We will win because we will stay on the offensive,” he promised, before meeting four members of the Iraqi Governing Council, appointed by the United States in July but increasingly chafing at the lack of powers the coalition has invested it with.

Mr Bush stayed at the airport, a well-defended enclave on the southwestern fringe of the capital, for 2½ hours before flying off again for Washington and then back to his ranch in Texas, where his family were invited for the holiday, unaware until the last minute that he had gone to Iraq.

While the airport — the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting in the last days of the war in April — is the most secure spot in Iraq, flying in and out is far from risk free, in a guerrilla war where the use of shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades is on the rise.

On Saturday a surface-to-air missile hit a DHL cargo plane flying out of the airport, setting one of its engines on fire and forcing it to return for an emergency landing. Military officials say, however, that the chances of an aircraft being shot down by such heat-seeking missiles are minimal.

Mr Bush’s visit received a mixed reaction from Iraqis in Baghdad, who, according to coalition statistics, are increasingly replacing US troops as the targets of guerrilla attacks.

The city was more alive than it has been since the war as Baghdadis celebrated the first festival of Eid ul-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan.

Jassim al-Hisani, a shoe shop owner, registered no surprise as he chewed his meal at a pavement café in central Baghdad. “If I'd known he was coming, I would have told him welcome, because he got rid of Saddam Hussein and I'm now very happy,” the smiling 41-year-old said.

But his dining companion, Ali Shibab, a carpenter, said the welcome had long since grown stale.

“At the beginning the US Army was good, but they said there would be safety and jobs, and there aren’t. Instead they went into houses and shot many people.

“Many innocent people have been killed by them, while they were doing nothing,” he said, echoing rights groups claims that US soldiers can be trigger-happy and are largely unaccountable.

The 82nd Airborne has a chequered reputation, having shot dead 18 protesters in the Sunni town of Fallujah in April, and killed eight Iraqi policemen and a Jordanian security guard in the same town in September.

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