Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on Friday declared his opposition to the Afghanistan war, saying the nine-year-old conflict was of President “Obama’s choosing,” and that the mission is “probably a lost cause” – prompting at least one prominent Republican to call for his resignation.
Steele made the comments at a fundraiser in Connecticut just two days after the Senate unanimously confirmed Gen. David Petraeus as the new U.S. commander in Afghanistan. Petraeus is taking over for Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was ousted over his and his aides’ scornful remarks of Obama’s national security team to Rolling Stone magazine, at a time when America’s casualty rate in the war is at record high and the offensive is falling short of expectations.
“This was a war of Obama’s choosing,” Steele said. “This is not something United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in.”
The war in Afghanistan began shortly after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, in the first year of President George W. Bush’s first term. Obama, at the time, was a state senator in Illinois.
“It was [Obama] who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan,” Steele said in his delivery, which was posted on YouTube. “Well, if he’s such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that’s the one thing you don’t do, is engage in land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed.”
Read more at foxnews.com……
