PRESIDENT BUSH drew a line under the two wars of his presidency yesterday, shuffling US military might around the globe to reflect Washington’s new world order.

Hours before Mr Bush declared major hostilities over in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, issued the same message in Afghanistan.

To deliver his own message, Mr Bush made a dramatic landing on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier, from where he addressed the American nation. Approaching the USS Abraham Lincoln at more than 125mph, Mr Bush sat in the co-pilot’s seat of a snub-nosed S3B Viking as it was jerked to a halt in less than 350ft by the carrier’s arrestor gear (a metal cable stretched across the deck).

Mr Bush, who trained as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard, took a last-minute course in how to eject from a submerged cockpit at the US Navy’s North Island base in San Deigo, California, before donning a pilot’s suit and making the 150-mile flight.

After landing, Mr Bush basked in the kind of photographs that politicians facing re-election campaigns can only dream off.

Mobbed by sailors returning home from a record-breaking ten-month deployment to the Gulf, the Commander-in-Chief looked in his element, slapping backs and posing for pictures.

On the other side of the world, as evidence of Mr Bush’s desire to move on from the two conflicts that flowed from the September 11 attacks, Pentagon chiefs accelerated changes to US force deployments to recognise better America’s altered alliances.

American military commanders yesterday ended a 12-year operation in Turkey, from where the US Air Force had policed the northern no-fly zone over Iraq. US chiefs said the mission was obsolete, but the abrupt withdrawal raises questions about Turkey’s strategic importance to the United States.

The reduction of American forces in Germany is also being speeded up. Instead of returning to bases in Germany, as planned, the US 1st Armoured Division will be deployed to new bases in Hungary, Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. Turkey and Germany both defied Washington over Iraq, while the former Eastern Bloc countries all supported the war.

The changes, which take US forces into Eastern Europe as never before, come days after the United States also pulled its combat forces out of Saudi Arabia amid speculation that the Pentagon is eyeing several Iraqi airfields as semi-permanent American bases.

White House strategists planned Mr Bush’s announcement aboard the Abraham Lincoln with maximum symbolism. It was the first time that a US President had pulled off such a feat, and was designed to imbue Mr Bush with the success of the military operation in Iraq without having him declare victory.

Under the Geneva Convention, coalition forces would have to release all enemy prisoners and stop targeting Iraqi leaders, neither of which they are yet willing to do.

Mr Bush was due to outline the “key objectives” for the United States in reconstructing Iraq, and US officials said the hunt for Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction would continue. But Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said that six weeks after the US had gone to war, it was an important moment for the President to tell the American people that major combat operations were over.

US officials named Paul Bremer, a former head of the State Department’s counter-terrorism office, as the civilian administrator in Iraq. He will oversee the country’s transition to democratic rule and head the team that will include General Jay Garner in charge of postwar reconstruction.

In Kabul, on the latest stop on his tour of the Gulf and central Asia, Mr Rumsfeld said that allied forces had moved from major combat operations to a period of stability and reconstruction. The Defence Secretary insisted that most of the country was secure. “I should underline, however, there are still dangers, still pockets of resistance, in parts of the country,” he said.

Even with that qualification, his assertion raised eyebrows. In one week alone last month, rockets were fired at a US base near the Pakistan border; four men planning an attack died when their explosives-packed car blew up; gunmen ambushed the brother of Kandahar’s governor, killing two of his relatives; and two Afghan workers were injured when gunmen attacked a United Nations mine-clearing vehicle.

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