James Fallows’ piece in the most recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly, “Blind into Baghdad,” is drawing a lot of attention from folks who oppose the Iraq war and President Bush.

(Al Franken has been reciting Fallows’ “findings” on his radio show like it’s a set of talking points stapled to his hand.)

In the article, Fallows spends much time making the argument that the Bush Administration – including the likes of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz - knowingly ignored detailed warnings for what lay ahead in Iraq once major combat operations ended.

It would truly be maddening... if it wasn’t such a load of manure.

Fallows was then-President Jimmy Carter’s chief speechwriter from 1977 to 1979. So a guy who worked for the folks who gave us Desert One is now lecturing America on what constitutes military readiness. (Next thing you know, John Dean will be running around saying it's all worse than Watergate!)

With that in mind, it’s worth taking a look at what Fallows writes and matching it up against reality. The full text of the article is found here, but here are some of the highlights:

The first tip-off that Fallows is working with flimsy evidence is this: It takes him a full 1,100 words just to get to his point – that a State Department study called “The Future of Iraq” spelled out prescient advice for President Bush’s war cabinet on how to avoid post-combat disaster. The war cabinet, as Fallows tells it, blew the study off and knowingly or recklessly sent our boys to their deaths.

(Franken, gushing over report, says it proves Wolfowitz, etc., “have blood on their hands.”)

The main points in “The Future of Iraq” and other warning signals are, as Fallows tells us:

- It was urgent for the Coalition to get Iraqi electricity back to pre-war levels quickly once the Saddam regime fell;

- It was urgent to hand over major, domestic security operations to the Iraqi military as quickly as possible;

- Proper U.S. troop strength was a must.
A lot of planning was done to envision post-combat Iraq, Fallows writes. But the Administration blew it off, he said:

(T)he Administration will be condemned for what it did with what was known. The problems the United States has encountered are precisely the ones its own expert agencies warned against. Exactly what went wrong with the occupation will be studied for years—or should be.

Luckily, we don’t have to wait so long to figure out what went wrong with Fallows’ story.

Let’s look at his main points, one at a time.

1)The power grid issue. According to “The Future of Iraq”, the coalition was advised to get Iraqi power up and running at pre-war levels, on the double. In another report Fallows cites, the Army War College suggests getting the grid up to pre-war levels within four months. It wound up taking between four and five months, according to CPA infrastructure reports. It’s worth noting that American casualties were actually greater in the months after the grid was back to pre-war levels than in the months before. So not only did the coalition do what the State Department study group and War College advised, it turned out to be pretty much a red herring anyway since it didn’t stem bloodshed;

2) The Coalition should let the Iraqi military play a role in security post-Saddam. Good in theory, but not in practice. CPA Administrator Paul Bremer, in formally disbanding the military, noted that the Iraqi military had already dissolved itself. Had it? Well, for the most part, the Iraqi military traditionally did a few things very well: run their rape rooms, use weapons of mass destruction to kill lots and lots of people, and surrender. Boy, did these guys know how to surrender. They started surrendering before the war even started.

During the war, others simply walked off their posts and headed back into the community. In fact, running away from their jobs was such a fun pastime for the Iraqi military, they even tried surrendering to TV news crews during the first Gulf War. There were essentially two sources of information that suggested the Iraqi army was a capable military machine: “The Future of Iraq” study commissioned by the State Department, and Baghdad Bob. Fallows might have been more intellectually honest if he had quoted the latter;

3) The U.S. army should be equipped at proper troop strength which, Fallows says, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz failed to order. This is an issue that’s been subject to intense debate since before the war started, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that a war critic would latch onto it. But Fallows’ sourcing here is – to be generous – suspect.

Fallows relies in his piece on media reports and an interview with former Army Secretary/Enron executive Thomas White – who was forced to resign after some disagreements with Rumsfeld and the president (not to mention the bad Enron press.) Using partial quotes from a disgruntled White, Fallows backs into hearsay quotes from Gen. Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff.

Shinseki, White is quoted as saying, suggested the Army should put way more troops into Iraq than it had in Bosnia. We have to take former Enron executive White’s word for it because Fallows didn’t bother to interview Shinseki himself. (It’s apparently OK to use hearsay quotes via a disgruntled ex-employee to slam the Bush administration, but Clinton supporters demanded DNA evidence to believe the 42nd president did wrong. And then they changed the subject when they got that evidence. But we digress.)

Shinseki did make a splash when he suggested a couple hundred thousand troops might be needed in the Iraq effort – a suggestion other war planners, including Gen. Tommy Franks – denied. But, during a March, 2003 pre-war Senate hearing, Shinseki was asked to elaborate on his thoughts:

I have testified…for 3 ½ years now that the mission profile that the Army was carrying even 3 years ago was larger than the inventory of formations we had, and I suggested that end strength was a concern. Three-and-a-half years ago we were not recruiting as well as we wanted, so we had to fix that first. The last three years we have made our recruiting targets. Our retention has always been good.

So, “Clinton’s Army” had major recruiting problems that were fixed by the time the Iraq war was launched, and retaining those recruits was never a problem. Shinseki continued:

Secretary White has asked us – even as we made our concerns public – has asked that the Army take a look at itself, and this is what is sort of caught up in the Third Wave discussions, to make sure that even as we talked about end strength, that the Army had done the right things about ensuring that soldiers were in soldiers’ positions, and so we are doing that, and the results of the study are forthcoming.

Shinseki also talked about re-jiggering the mix between National Guard troops and full-time military personnel, as well as combat-ready personnel versus administrative staff.

Fallows quotes other aspects of Shinseki's testimony. But it doesn't fit into Fallows' theory, so the author accuses the general of being "loyally vague" in his Senate testimony.

Did Shinseki suggest there were no troop strength issues? No. But did he sound a warning that kids would die in Iraq because not enough soldiers would be deployed? Not quite.

Fallows also rehashes, accusingly, Vice President Cheney's remarks that Iraqis would greet U.S. troops as liberators. But then Fallows fails to note that most of the post-combat violence in Iraq has been instigated largely by Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist henchmen and al Qaeda affiliates. Rank-and-file Iraqis, including a majority of Shia, oppose the violence. Fallows joins in a wild overstatement that has, for some reason, become treated as gospel.

He wraps up the Atlantic piece by throwing out more accusations on the fly.

Rumsfeld, he said, "(p)recisely because he could not foresee all hazards...should have been more zealous about avoiding the ones that were evident—the big and obvious ones the rest of the government tried to point out to him."

Avoiding hazards that are evident? You mean like the potential for Saddam to have blown up oil fields? The potential for hundreds of thousands of refugees to attempt to flee to places like Turkey and Iran? The potential for the Iraqi army to collapse under the weight of its cowardice, ineptitude and neglect? Like those evident hazards?

Like Sen. John Kerry, Fallows also points a finger of judgment at Bush Administration "triumphalism." But it's not that President Bush believes is views are superior to all others just genocidal, murderous tyrants. (Fallows' old boss, Jimmy Carter, could have used a little triumphalism when it came to Daniel Ortega, Leonid Brezhnev, Fidel Castro and the Ayatollah.)

Finally, Fallows accuses the president of not having an interest in details - of only wanting to pursue large causes regardless of the obstacles. He should pick up the phone and call CIA Director George Tenet, in that case, and let him know that the president won't be needing all those daily, in-person briefings on every detail of threats to national security.

Maybe, instead, when the next crisis arises, President Bush can read the work of a State Department study group before making all of his decisions. Either that, or he can pick up the phone and call up Baghdad Bob.