Nobody expected this visit.
On Labor Day, a U.S. holiday.
No newspaper in the country was able to break the news.
Only early this morning online news sites and TV stations told us about the trip.
The pool of reporters aboard Air Force One were summoned to the White House over the weekend.
They were told to show up at Andrews on Sunday between 6 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., not this morning, as had been publicly announced.
Reporters were permitted to inform their spouses and just one editor.
When they boarded Air Force One inside a hangar the shades were drawn and Secret Service agents took their pager devices and cellphones until shortly before the plane landed in Iraq.
Then he spoke, didn’t take any questions from the press, but the TV cameras controlled by the Army delivered the message.
And the media has been broadcasting the message all day.
As The New York Times says:
The administration has seized on the Sunni tribes’ sudden willingness to cooperate in fighting the homegrown extremist group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia as a promising political development that they hope will convince members of Congress, especially nervous Republicans, that political progress is happening, albeit from the ground up, not from the top down, as the administration strategy initially envisioned.
The Anbar story tells us how bad the coverage of this war is.
So bad, that the White House was able to find and to promote their case by total surprise.
The new White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, who accompanied President Bush to Iraq, posed with Marines at Al-Asad Airbase in Anbar.
As you can see, she was really happy.
The White House: 1
The Press: 0
A perfect coupe de presse!
(AP Photos/Charles Dharapak)