President Bush made a surprise visit to Iraq yesterday, where he paid tribute to the successes of the US military in the former heartland of the Sunni insurgency and hinted that some troops could soon be heading home.

The six-hour visit to a dusty airbase in Anbar province was designed to shore up support for the President’s controversial war strategy before next week’s showdown with Congress in which Democrats and some Republicans are demanding a rapid withdrawal of US combat troops.

The President held a “war council” with leading US and Iraqi officials, including General David Petraeus, the US commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the US Ambassador to Iraq, who will give Congress their verdicts next week on the success of Mr Bush’s “surge” strategy, which has resulted in an additional 30,000 troops deployed to Iraq this year.

Afterwards, standing in front of two Humvees in the desert outpost 120 miles (195km) west of Baghdad, Mr Bush insisted that real progress had been made in Iraq and that if the current strategy continued it would be “possible to maintain the same level of security with fewer forces”.

He then delivered a speech to about 600 cheering Marines, saying that the date when they could come home would be determined by “a calm assessment of our commanders on the ground, not a nervous reaction from politicians in Washington to poll results in the media”.

Such decisions, added Mr Bush, must be made on the basis of “strength and success, not fear and failure”.

He repeatedly sought to link the fight against al-Qaeda in Iraq with the wider battle against terrorism, saying: “We don’t want to hear their footsteps back home, we want to keep them on their heels here.”

Mr Bush chose to fly to Anbar province where he met some of the local tribal leaders — or “grizzled vets” as he called them yesterday — who have forged an alliance with the US military to drive out extremists from al-Qaeda. It is the one real bright spot in an otherwise bleak picture.

The President pointedly did not visit Baghdad, a sign of his frustration with the failure of Iraq’s Government to attempt political reconciliation with the Sunnis.

Instead, Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s Shia Prime Minister, was obliged to make his third visit to the overwhelmingly Sunni province of Anbar. He received a noticeably frostier greeting from Mr Bush than Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi President, received.

Mr Bush urged the Iraqi Government to respond to the progress in Anbar. The trip was planned in great secrecy. He was supposed to be flying to an Asia-Pacific summit in Australia yesterday morning but instead slipped out of a side door of the White House on Sunday night, drove to Andrews Air Force Base, and boarded Air Force One for the 12-hour flight to Iraq.

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