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• Mr. Fallows' official site
• Excerpt from Blind Into Baghdad
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Tavis: James Fallows is an award-winning writer who serves as national correspondent for 'The Atlantic Monthly' magazine. He's also a contributor to the 'New York Review of Books.' His latest book is a collection of articles he's written for 'The Atlantic Monthly' called 'Blind Into Baghdad, America's War in Iraq.' James Fallows, first of all, nice to have you here, and welcome back to your native California. (Laugh)

James Fallows: Thank you very much, I'm glad to be here, and on the show.

Tavis: Good to have you on, on the west coast. The left coast, as they say. 'Blind Into Baghdad,' great title. Doesn't leave much to the imagination, though.

Fallows: Well, this was mainly a compilation of stories I've done for 'The Atlantic Monthly' over the last four years, with some new material. One of them was called 'Blind Into Baghdad,' and the argument of it was that the United States government actually had prepared very, very well for all the things that have happened since the fall of Baghdad. For the looting, for the problems with power supplies, for the sectarian violence, and all the rest.

And the mystery is why this knowledge that had been accumulated at all different levels of the government was not put into effect. And that's one of several mysteries I try to explore in the book.

Tavis: Let's start to explore it. One, first of all, I think for the average American to hear you say that, either their ears are perking up right now, or they're laughing, like this guy's an idiot. Because there's no way that one could look at what one sees and believe that there was a plan in place, or that there was a detailed strategy in place to avoid this, and yet it wasn't implemented?

Fallows: Well, there's actually a way that viewers can check this for themselves. If they go to the website of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, I think it's called the Strategic Studies Institute, they can find something that came out in the fall of 2002, which is about four months before the war began, saying here's what we know about occupations, here's what we know about Iraq, here's what we have to watch out for.

And this was the U.S. Army's think tank, saying looting is gonna be the problem in the first week. Having enough troops is gonna be the second problem. Having electric supply is gonna be a third problem. Turning from liberators into occupiers is gonna be the next. Having a legitimate government. So lots of this stuff, from the CIA, the Army, the Marine Corps, it existed, and for various reasons, the political leadership decided that it just would slow down the war effort to pay too much time preparing for these things.

Tavis: Explain a little bit more on that latter point, 'cause I'm trying, again, to figure out - here's what I'm trying to juxtapose in my own mind. When you say for various reasons, I know that means, obviously, there's more than one. But for various reasons, they didn't do it. I'm trying to figure out, with all of the, with the plummet in the President's ratings, all the hell that he's catching as a result of this, all the politics that he has put his own party through, these men and women running for reelection who have to wear the weight of his mess around their necks when they go home. All of that makes me kind of wonder why, if there was a better way to do this, they didn't implement it?

Fallows: That's the crucial question. Actually, in the new material ending this book, I say there's a number of questions we won't know the answer to for a long time, and maybe the hardest one is the one you just raised. If the liberation of Iraq and its conversion into a democracy was so important for this administration, why were they so careless and cavalier and sloppy? And I think the best explanation that we have now, partly, they thought it was gonna turn out better.

I believe that Paul Wolfowitz, former number two in the Defense Department, and Vice President Cheney, I think they actually thought it would be like the fall of Poland, or the fall of the Czech Republic after the Communists were evicted. So they thought it would work better, and also they thought if you really paid attention to all the arguments about how to make it work right, you'd have to wait a while before you went to war.

You'd need to have a bigger alliance, you'd need more troops, you'd need more civil affairs specialists. And so it wasn't convenient to sort of pay attention to those details. They thought they'd worry about them later on.

Tavis: What about just pure arrogance and hubris?

Fallows: (Laugh) You could go a long way with that explanation, too. And I think if you remember, if you watch Secretary Rumsfeld or Vice President Cheney these days, you see that same thing. The Vice President incredibly saying...

Tavis: I was gonna get to that, so go ahead and take it, yeah.

Fallows: (Laugh) A week or two ago, he was saying if they had it to do over again, they would do exactly the same things. Letting looting rage untrammeled for a month or so, disbanding the Iraqi army, which they're still trying to catch up for. Letting these militias form; letting the electric supply go to hell. They would do exactly the same thing? So that is hubris.

And I think that you also saw it before the war, in the famous testimony by Paul Wolfowitz, when he was dismissing Eric Shinseki, then the Army's Chief of Staff, saying it's impossible to imagine it could be harder to occupy this country than to conquer it. And of course it's a hundred times harder to occupy the country than to conquer it.

Tavis: I was out of this country when Vice President Cheney made that comment, and I could not wait to get back home, and I was in a particular part of the world where it wasn't as easy to get the kind of stuff I needed to get. So even getting online wasn't easy at this hotel where I was staying at the time. That said, you're the first person I get a chance to ask about this on national television, now that I'm back here on my show.

I'm curious as to why you think there wasn't more of a - and I saw certain writers take him on about this. But I as hoping that there would be absolute outrage at the Vice President. And it's not about my politics, but I'm saying as an American citizen, for our Vice President to say we would have done this the same way all over again, even if they didn't have WMDs suggests to me a kind, well, I don't wanna put words in your mouth. But what did you make of that remark?

Fallows: I thought it was incredible and on a political level, I thought the Vice President is really putting all his chips into the pot. They figure they're with this war for better or worse, so they might as well be with it all the way. We were right. It didn't matter if there were WMD, we did the right thing. And so I think politically, that's what he was saying. And the Vice President, he has, much like the President, their strength has been resolve, no doubt, no second thoughts, no hesitation.

They associate that with Democrats, the party of flip-flops, the part of being wishy-washy. So there must be some people in the administration, Colin Powell is now beginning to show this, and I imagine Paul Wolfowitz in this new job, is thinking jeez, if we had to do this over again, maybe we could make it turn out better. But I was astonished by that statement.

Tavis: Maybe I'm reading too much into this. Does that set a new standard - for me it'd be a low standard, personally - but does that set a new sort of standard for when, where, and how we engage the world or parts of the world, militarily? Am I making sense here?

Fallows: I think the test is, we don't care if they have WMD or not, even though that was the premise first of going in, then there is new standard. On the other hand, there's no spare military anymore. So there's only so many other countries we could invade, because so much of our force is tied down in Iraq.

Tavis: You make a powerful point, and I wanna give you a chance to just kind of share it more with me, 'cause I'm curious about this. You make - and I don't wanna bastardize what you were trying to say. (Laugh) You said it so brilliantly, but let me paraphrase. That if we keep calling everything we engage in war, if we keep calling this war, then it really does detract. You take the thought.

Fallows: Well, I have an article in the current issue of 'The Atlantic Monthly' essentially saying that the war on terrorism, that term has outlived its usefulness. We need to work against terrorists in the very long term, but the open-ended war has gone too far, because wars mean emergencies. They mean national sacrifice. They mean people doing things they wouldn't ordinarily do. And if you have an open-ended, perpetual war that most of us who are not in the military aren't doing anything about except taking off our shoes when we go through the airport screening.

We're not paying more taxes; we're not doing any kind of national service. I think it's much better to talk about the long-term effort we have to make, rather than just saying this is a war. 'Cause the term itself becomes debased. You don't her the Brits talking this way. They're rounding up their own terrorist suspects, but they're not saying we're re-declaring war.

Tavis: If what we are witnessing right now in Iraq should be called something other than war, what would James Fallows want to call what we are...?

Fallows: Well, I think what's happening in Iraq, that is a genuine war. It's becoming a counter-insurgency war, and tragically a civil war, too. And I think that it's - to hear the Vice President again say this is just what they wanted, just what they anticipated, is incredible. Every day there's a headline, a hundred Iraqis killed in bomb blast. Yesterday in the 'Los Angeles Times,' they were talking about bodies clogging the sewers.

In these sectarian killings, they stuffed them down the manhole, and the sewers were backing up with bodies in Baghdad. So it's a civil war, it's an insurgency. And managing this violence in the most expeditious way possible is really the only goal we have left to try to contain it.

Tavis: Do you have more thoughts about what that latter point means?

Fallows: Yes, and can I make a political point? (unintelligible)

Tavis: Sure you can.

Fallows: I think the Vice President did the Democrats a huge favor. 'Cause they've been in this sort of dilemma. The Republicans say to them okay, what's your plan? And there's a problem, 'cause there's no good plan anymore. Nobody has a good plan. But by the Vice President saying this is exactly, we'd do it just this way, the Democrats can say anything other than this current stance. If you want anything other, do it our way.

For our policy, the main goal for the U.S. now is to contain the domestic carnage, so you don't have hundreds of Iraqis every day being killed. And that, in my view, means redoubling all of our efforts to cleaning up the local security forces. The police and the militia. And that should transcend everything else we do. And as we damp down the violence, then we find a way to get out.

Tavis: Let me switch gears somewhat slightly. There's so many other policy questions I could ask you, but let me, in the time I have left, ask one or two personal questions, if I might. Actually professional questions. I so enjoy reading your piece in 'Atlantic Monthly.' And even though we don't always agree on every particular point, your writing is pretty spectacular. Tell me how you go about writing these super-long, in-depth pieces that I suspect take a great deal of time to get done before they actually come out.

Fallows: What I love most about journalism and feel very honored in working for the 'Atlantic' is the chance just to go ask people about things. So for this latest article I did, I talked to about 60 experts on terrorism.

Tavis: For one article.

Fallows: For one article, over a period of about two and a half months. And that's what I love to do. I don't like writing. Writing is hard. But I love going to people with a question in my own mind, saying what do you think about this? What should we make of this evidence? How do you think things are going? And so, that's how most of these long articles for the 'Atlantic' and the ones in this book take form.

Tavis: What's your sense, looking back now, we're obviously at the five-year mark, and everybody knows that from days ago. What's your sense on looking back on this blind effort into Baghdad now?

Fallows: I think the U.S. - the year 2002 was a historically tragic year for the United States. Not 9/11, 2001, but 2002. The beginning of 2002, we had a federal budget surplus, we had the strongest military in the world. It was untrammeled, and all the rest of the world supported us. The end of 2002, the desire to recover from 9/11 had become the desire to invade Iraq, in sort of this sloppy way we've done it. So I think we were on a course that's gonna take us a very long time, militarily and diplomatically, as you know from traveling the world, to recover from what this has done to the U.S.

Tavis: What's your sense, though, to that latter point, of how we get out of this? And I don't even mean tactically. I'm not looking for the kind of dissertation in that regard. But so much damage has been done, is there - how do I wanna phrase this? Is there a way back?

Fallows: One of the great things about America, this is the most resilient country that's ever been. I'm actually based in China now. I've been in Shanghai for the last two months, I'm gonna be there for the next couple of years. And it's clear simultaneously there's this tremendous reservoir of respect for the United States and the things it's capable of, and resentment of the United States for the last couple of years of our policy. So I think there is a reservoir we have to draw on.

As the nation that attracts people from around the world and has these great universities, it has an open heart. So I think it's showing a different face to the world. I think it means, and again not in a partisan way, whoever is the next administration, Republican or Democratic, will have sort of a new chance to do that with the world.

Tavis: He's quite a writer. He is James Fallows. His new book is 'Blind Into Baghdad, America's War in Iraq.' Of course, writer for 'The Atlantic Monthly' magazine, whose pieces I enjoy. James Fallows, nice to meet you.

Fallows: Thank you so much. An honor to be here.

Tavis: Glad to have you on, sir. Thank you. Up next on this program, the president of the new CW network, UPN, WB combined, CW. Their head is Dawn Ostroff, and we'll talk to her in a moment.