Introducing a report on Monday's NBC Nightly News about Al-Qaeda forces seizing control of the Iraqi city of Fallujah, anchor Brian Williams went out of his way to blame the President George W. Bush for the deteriorating security situation: "U.S. fighting forces are gone from Iraq. But as so many predicted when President Bush chose to go to war there after 9/11, the fighting has started up again." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
However, in the report that followed, correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin featured a sound bite of President Obama – not President Bush – celebrating the "historic moment" of an abrupt U.S. troop withdrawal from the country after failing to negotiate a status of forces agreement with the Iraqi government. Mohyeldin noted: "Some warned the U.S. withdrawal left a security vacuum."
At the end of the segment, Mohyeldin placed Iraq in the context of an increasingly unstable Middle East:
Now, the conflict is not just about the battle inside Iraq, this is obviously really focused on the conflict in neighboring Syria. And what happens in Syria is already spilling across the region into neighboring countries such as Lebanon and Turkey. And at the core of it really are two major regional powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and we are seeing them fighting in almost every single one of these countries.
Williams observed that it was an "increasingly dangerous neighborhood," but Obama's incoherent foreign policy was not cited as a cause.
Read more:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kyle-drennen/2014/01/07/nbc-bush-blame-security-vacuum-iraq-created-obamas-troop-withdrawal#ixzz2ppCdiBcq
