BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

“Make no mistake,” Brian Williams lectured us on his Friday, the 13th Nightly News broadcast. “What is happening in Iraq now is the direct outgrowth of the U.S. decision to invade the country over a decade ago.”

If Williams was attempting to channel the spirit Walter Cronkite he really blew it. Williams has made sure no one will ever portray him as the modern-day Cronkite, the consummate newsman and renowned CBS anchor who concluded a series of special reports on the Vietnam War in 1968 with what was then the shocking opinion (Walter was so objective, we never knew he had opinions) that the war would end in stalemate. He was wrong, of course.  It ended in defeat.

Williams’ commentary was inappropriate for a variety of reasons and he ought to apologize for making it.

First and foremost, he has no business editorializing on a news broadcast. It violates our trust. It reduces the Nightly News to a fickle-looking, cheap imitation of MSNBC.

Secondly, his comment was absurdly partisan. It was clearly intended to place blame for what has occurred in Iraq on President George W. Bush.

Third, the statement was stupid. Maybe that should be first. Who besides Williams is dumb enough or arrogant enough to assume they can capsulize in two sentences what is occurring in Iraq today; why the extremist ISIS militants are rampaging through Iraq executing prisoners, raping women and threatening the annihilation of the Nouri al-Maliki government?

Brian Williams is the new dumb blonde of the news media.

There is a school of thought, apparently rejected out of hand by Professor Williams, that what is occurring in Iraq today is riddled with complexity, another incarnation of the ancient struggle between the Sunni and Shiite factions of Islam, reflective of the never-ending human conflict that arises when power is not shared between or among legitimate heirs to that power. To suggest that this Sunni insurgency is an outgrowth of Bush’s military intervention in the region oversimplifies to the point of obfuscation.

Rich Galen, in his Mullings column this week, quoted former British Prime Minister Tony Blair: “Even if you’d left Saddam in place in 2003, then when 2011 happened – and you had the Arab revolutions going through Tunisia and Libya and Yemen and Bahrain and Egypt and Syria – you would have still had a major problem in Iraq.

“Indeed,” he said, “you can see what happens when you leave the dictator in place, as has happened with Assad now. The problems don’t go away.”

Williams sophistry reminds us once again that one of the elements of our national dysfunction when it comes to the execution of public policy is the lack of what defense contractors and military strategists call “actionable intelligence,” simply put the knowledge necessary to act intelligently. The public is sadly misinformed and ill-informed and a good share of the blame rests with the media.

Media have a responsibility to keep the public informed and educated on situations and issues that have or portend to have a profound impact on our lives.

There has been a dramatic drop off in coverage of Iraq since the U.S. pulled out of the country more than a year ago. “The media have long since checked out of Iraq,” Howard Kurtz opined on Fox News last week. “Even in the final years of U.S. involvement, the images of war all but faded from television and the newspaper stories moved to inside pages.”

Kurtz blamed the lack of coverage on war fatigue, the cost of coverage, and the fact that both the American people and American journalists were just plain fed up with it. Not good enough.

The stability of the region and the fate of the Maliki government continue to be in the vital interests of the United States, but most of us have been told little or nothing about what has been occurring there, until Mosul and Tikrit fell to the insurgents and the government army went running to the hills. You have to wonder what public pressure could have produced had the public been better informed over the past year or so, but that is really not the issue. The media don’t make that judgment.

And they certainly have an obligation, a solemn one, to get their basic facts right and, if needed, provide perspective that is knowledge-based, from sources who know what they’re talking about and don’t have a blatantly-political agenda. Too much to ask?

Editors’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff.   He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.