WELCOME to the debut of “The Truth Is!”, a blog of reporting and commentary that aims to be informative, thoughtful and provocative. At least initially, the blog will have a strong heartland flavor by virtue of the connection of a number of us to Cowles family journalism. I am former editor of the Des Moines Register’s opinion pages. Another contributor, Michael Gartner, is former editor of the paper; he later served as president of NBC News. Another former Register editor who has agreed to contribute, Geneva Overholser, is director of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg school of journalism. Followers of the blog will have access also to the work of Herbert Strentz of Des Moines, a close Register and other newspaper watcher who once headed Drake University’s journalism school. Bill Leonard, a longtime Register editorial writer, will add insights.

“The Truth Is!” will be supervised by my daughter, Marcia Wolff, a communications lawyer for 20 years with Arnold and Porter (Washington, D.C.). Invaluable technical assistance in assembling and maintaining the blog is provided by my grandsons Julian Cranberg, a college first-year, and Daniel Wolff, a high school senior.

If you detect a whiff of nepotism in this operation, so be it. All of it is strictly a labor of love. —Gil Cranberg

Monday, October 28, 2013

Gilbert Cranberg: OBAMA’S DEBT TO GEORGE W. BUSH

You can take a calculator to the ill-considered U.S. invasion of Iraq for the sickening numbers -- a cost of $1 trillion and nearly 5,000 American lives lost. No calculator, however, can add up the underlying losses. As Mark Danner wrote in the Nov. 7 New York Review of Books, "Before the war, Iraq was void of an anti-American Islamic jihadist movement; today Iraq is filled with thousands of motivated Islamic guerrillas, many of them veterans of the Iraqi army the United States dissolved, who have taken up arms not only against the Shia government the U.S. helped put in place but against the regime of Bashar al-Assad across Iraq's western border. Before the war Iraq served as a rival and geostrategic counter to the Islamic republic of Iran, for three decades the United States' main adversary in the Middle East; today 'liberated' Iraq is a staunch ally of Iran, the nation that, along with Russia, is now aiding most actively that same Assad government. Together, Iraq's Shia government and Sunni opposition are fueling both sides of Syria's civil war, and that civil war, in turn, through a perverse 'boomerang effect,' is further destabilizing Iraq -- all to the detriment of U.S. interests."

The people who talked the U.S. into invading Iraq -- and remember, it was both parties and some of the country's best foreign-policy thinkers who supported the war -- couldn't possibly have anticipated the complicated outcome. Which remains the best reason for the U.S. to keep to the sidelines in Syria's convoluted civil war. Memories of the ill-fated invasion of Iraq have contributed to the paralysis of U.S. will, as it should. Irony of ironies, George W. Bush's biggest blunder might well have been keeping Barack Obama from making one of his own.

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