FOX News chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle used a dubious estimate of how many Iraqi security forces the U.S.-led coalition has successfully trained in order to portray House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's (D-CA) call for the Bush administration to “change course” in Iraq and commit to “intense training of Iraqi armies” as pointless and ignorant. Angle showed a clip of Pelosi's remark, then insisted that “military officials say” such efforts have “been well under way for months, resulting in a trained force of 120,000 Iraqi military and police.”

In citing the 120,000 figure, Angle was uncritically repeating Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's dubious claim, made during her recent Senate confirmation hearings, that the U.S.-led coalition has trained that many Iraqis. But Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-DE) vigorously disputed this claim at the time, and news accounts have since indicated that Rice's figure is misleading because many of these forces have received only minimal training, and U.S. commanders consider them unprepared to effectively combat the insurgency.

TIME magazine reported (subscription required) in its January 31 issue that the military is indeed planning to “change course” following the elections and that the 120,000 figure is “misleading”:

[T]he Pentagon wants to insert more [U.S. military] advisers ... into Iraqi units that someday will lead the fight against the insurgency, part of a strategy to accelerate the handover of combat duties to Iraqi forces and pull U.S. troops back from the front lines. In briefings for TIME, Pentagon officials and military commanders outlined a two-pronged strategy aimed at easing the U.S. footprint in Iraq after Jan. 30 --which the military hopes will relieve the combat burden enough for a drawing down of U.S. forces to be contemplated. ...

The exit door in Iraq, the Bush Administration insists, hinges on the Pentagon's effort to train Iraqi security forces to take on the insurgency themselves. So far the results have been mixed. At her confirmation hearing to be Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice told Senators last week that the Iraqi security forces total about 120,000 in uniform. But that number is misleading: only about 14,000 of them are trained ground soldiers. Overall, the training of the Iraqis has been slower and less consistent than military planners had hoped.

Some Iraqi National Guard soldiers, for example, have received only two weeks of training before being sent to their units. Meanwhile, many of the country's better-trained regular army soldiers still don't have the weapons and armored vehicles they need.

Similarly, The Washington Post reported on January 20 that many of the 120,000 troops that Rice and Angle cited “are not yet capable of waging effective operations against an aggressive insurgency” without the support of U.S. troops:

U.S. military commanders in Iraq defended Rice's estimate as reasonable, but they acknowledged yesterday that some of the more than 120,000 are not yet capable of waging effective operations against an aggressive insurgency. Some lack experience, and many are fresh from training.

From the January 31 edition of FOX News' Special Report with Brit Hume:

ANGLE: The remarkable success of the Iraqi elections prompted even Democratic leaders critical of the president to hail the results as an amazing and important step forward.

[clips of praise from Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)]

But every ounce of praise was accompanied by a pound of criticism about the administration's handling in Iraq and warnings about the future.

PELOSI: [clip] Now we are in a situation where we have to change course. Instead of focusing completely on fighting the insurgents, we have to have an intense training of the Iraqi armies.

ANGLE: Something military officials say have been well under way for months, resulting in a trained force of 120,000 Iraqi military and police.