WASHINGTON, Nov 29: President George W. Bush’s secret visit to Iraq on Thanksgiving holiday will raise his standing close to the 2004 elections but will do little to improve America’s image in Iraq, US newspapers and political commentators said on Saturday.

Mr Bush’s admirers argued that the surprise visit has increased America’s image across the world.

Critics disagreed. They described the trip as a magnificent public relation exercise but said there’s little else to rationalize risking the life of the president and those accompanying him.

“Let the chips fall where they may,” National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said of potential criticism that the trip was politically motivated.

Ms Rice, who accompanied the president, insisted that the public would view Mr Bush’s trip as a worthy act by the president, not a political move.

The Chicago Tribune said the trip was “a blunt reminder to (the opposition) Democrats hoping to challenge Mr Bush, of just how much power a president has to shape the agenda.”

“It’s a reminder of the fact that it’s hard to match the president of the United States for drawing attention to himself,” Andrew Kohut, director of a prestigious think-tank, the Pew Research Center, told the Tribune.

“In a single day, Mr Bush did much to steer the images of Iraq — at least in the short term — away from the daily US casualties and instead to the cheering troops recommitting themselves to a mission some soldiers have openly criticized,” the newspaper said.

The New York Times reported from Baghdad that the visit has had little impact on the ordinary Iraqis. “Many Iraqis — though they gave Mr Bush and Mrs Hilary Clinton points for bravery — said their visits were irrelevant. The measure for them, unlike for the American soldiers who seemed buoyed by the visits, was whether life here would change as a result,” the newspaper said.

“We don’t care about visits like this,” Nuha Hassan, 33, a mother of three told NYT. “What we care about is whether there is electricity, about whether we can send our children to school without worrying.”

“Still, the novelty value, especially of Mr. Bush’s swoop into Iraq, was high,” the newspaper noted.

Howard Dean, a Democrat hoping to challenge Mr. Bush in the 2004 election, said the visit will not change the fact that those brave men and women (US soldiers) should never have been fighting in Iraq in the first place.”