PRESIDENT BUSH was basking in the afterglow of one of the most audacious public relations exercises in presidential image-making yesterday.

“Yes, I flew it,” said a triumphant Mr Bush, dressed in full flight suit, helmet tucked under his arm, moments after clambering out of a US Navy jet on to the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln.

The President, who trained as a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard, took the controls of the S3B Viking for about a third of its 150-mile journey from the mainland to the nuclear-powered carrier.

Although the take-off and tricky landing were performed by his pilot, Mr Bush, strutting around the flight deck on a sun-kissed afternoon and slapping the backs of exultant sailors, clearly revelled in his “Top Gun moment”.

It lasted only a few minutes, during which Mr Bush became the first president to land on a moving aircraft carrier and the first to address the American people from a flight deck in prime television time. However, the event was hailed as a masterstroke.

The Republican strategists who orchestrated its every detail, with its themes of US military might flush with victory, will ensure the images carry all the way to polling day in November 2004. In his address, Mr Bush hailed “the arrival of a new era”. Quick victory in Iraq showed how the sophistication of US weaponry meant that military action was increasingly an easier policy decision.

Mr Bush said that in defeating Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, the allies had to flatten cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. “With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war. Yet it is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent.”

Mr Bush recast the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as “battles” in the wider war on terrorism. For the first time, he declared a “turning of the tide” in that war, a theme echoed by Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, on a visit to Britain. In a news conference with Geoff Hoon, his opposite number, Mr Rumsfeld said the rounding up of al-Qaeda suspects and the sharing of intelligence was making that war “increasingly successful”.

Mr Bush, seeking to counter sniping that he had declared a timeless war, or at least one that would allow him to go to the polls next year as a wartime leader, insisted that the war on terrorism was “not endless”. But in a reminder that intelligence services are waging an intense war, US officials warned pilots and airports that al-Qaeda was planning an aerial attack on the American Consulate in Karachi.

Mr Bush reaffirmed the “Bush doctrine”, that an individual, group or “outlaw state” supporting terrorism was “a target of American justice”. The electoral cycle makes it unlikely that he will seek conflict before the end of 2004. He stopped short of naming states which are close to breaching his doctrine, but made it clear that the US was ready to act again.

Mr Bush completed his visit to California with what is emerging as the underlying strategy of his re-election bid. At the firm which makes the US Army’s Bradley fighting vehicles, he mixed concern for the economy, which saw unemployment yesterday hit a four-month high of 6 per cent, with a celebration of military successes. In Iraq, the arrest of three senior officials in Saddam Hussein’s regime underlined why Mr Bush had stopped short of declaring a formal victory. Such a declaration would mean Americans having to release all prisoners and stop targeting leaders.

As Mr Bush left California for his Texas ranch, the indulgence of his flight to the Pacific became clear as the need for his dramatic landing on the Abraham Lincoln was questioned.

Officials had explained that Mr Bush would have to fly by Navy jet because the carrier was too far out to sea for his helicopter to make the journey. But it emerged that the Abraham Lincoln was so close to the coast that it had to slow its pace lest views of the shoreline spoilt pictures of Mr Bush at sea. His helicopter landed discreetly on the flight deck a few hours later, waiting to carry him back to land.

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