THE WISE MAN SPEAKS – AT 8:29 A.M. ET:  George Shultz has always been one of my favorite secretaries of state.  He served under President Reagan and actually had the radical view that the State Department should work on behalf of the United States. 

One of the best stories about Shultz concerns his meetings with new U.S. ambassadors.  He'd take one of them to a map and ask, "Which is your country?"  Almost inevitably, the appointee would point to the country where he was being posted.  "No," Shultz would reply.  He then pointed to the United States.  "This is your country."  Just a friendly reminder to avoid the "citizen of the world" syndrome that occasionally takes hold at State.

Now Shultz has expressed himself, in his usual blunt manner, about Obama's Afghanistan strategy.  The Washington Times reports:

Reagan-era Secretary of State George Shultz blasted President Obama Monday night for his scheduled July 2011 date to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

Mr. Shultz, 89, made the unusually blunt remarks at a packed dinner for the International Republican Institute -- the GOP-aligned counterpart to the National Democratic Institute -- where he was receiving the organization's 2010 Freedom Award.

"You're out of your mind," he said at a question-and-answer forum, when asked his opinion of the president's drawdown date. "How can you say that 'if I haven't won by six or nine months from now, I'm leaving?' "

COMMENT:  Indeed.  How can you say it?  But Obama is beholden to his leftist base, and the base wants nothing to do with Afghanistan, even though it went along with the Democratic hoax during the 2008 campaign that Afghanistan was the "good" war and Iraq the "bad war," engineered by BUSH (!!).

The enemy simply has to wait us out.  They detect, we can be sure, President Obama's lack of enthusiasm for the Afghan mission. 

Imagine if, after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt told the American people that we'd fight until 1943, and then start returning soldiers to civilian life?  He could easily have been impeached.  But times have changed.

July, 2011, isn't very far away. 

October 5, 2010