Shinseki Selected to Lead Veterans' Affairs

by Damozel | Obama will name Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the first Asian four-star general to head the Department of Veterans' Affairs.  Ambinder:

The general who had the most conspicuous premonition about Iraq, and who lost his job because of it, will now be overseeing the care of those maimed and wounded in the war.

Eric Shinseki will be named tomorrow, Pearl Harbor Day, as Obama's nominee for Veterans Affairs Secretary.

Shinseki was the general who threw a spanner in the merrily-cranking bullshit mill that was the run-up to the Iraq war and he was forcibly retired because of it.   The Washington Post reminds us:

To maintain the postwar peace in Iraq, Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2003, "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" could be necessary. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reacted by telling reporters that the estimate "will prove to be high," and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz called it "way off the mark."

When Shinseki retired that summer, neither Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz attended his farewell ceremony.

Three years later, Gen. John P. Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command and the main architect of U.S. military strategy in Iraq, told the same committee, "General Shinseki was right." And in January 2007, President Bush ordered tens of thousands of U.S. troops back into Iraq to stabilize and secure the country. (WaPo)

Here's an excerpt from James Fallows famous piece, Blind Into Baghdad:

One of the strongest advocates of a larger force was General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff. White said, "Guys like Shinseki, who had been in Bosnia [where he supervised the NATO force], been in Kosovo, started running the numbers and said, 'Let's assume the world is linear.' For five million Bosnians we had two hundred thousand people to watch over them. Now we have twenty-five million Iraqis to worry about, spread out over a state the size of California. How many people is this going to take?" The heart of the Army's argument was that with too few soldiers, the United States would win the war only to be trapped in an untenable position during the occupation.

A note of personal rancor complicated these discussions, as it did many disagreements over postwar plans. In our interview Douglas Feith played this down—maintaining that press reports had exaggerated the degree of quarreling and division inside the Administration. These reports, he said, mainly reflected the experience of lower-level officials, who were embroiled in one specific policy area and "might find themselves pretty much always at odds with their counterparts from another agency." Higher up, where one might be "fighting with someone on one issue but allied with them on something else," relations were more collegial. Perhaps so. But there was no concealing the hostility within the Pentagon between most uniformed leaders, especially in the Army, and the civilians in OSD.

Donald Rumsfeld viewed Shinseki as a symbol of uncooperative, old-style thinking, and had in the past gone out of his way to humiliate him. In the spring of 2002, fourteen months before the scheduled end of Shinseki's term, Rumsfeld announced who his successor would be; such an announcement, which converts the incumbent into a lame duck, usually comes at the last minute. The action was one of several calculated insults...

From OSD's point of view, Shinseki and many of his colleagues were dragging their feet. From the Army's point of view, OSD was being reckless about the way it was committing troops and high-handed in disregarding the military's professional advice.

And---surprise, surprise---the Chickenhawks who were calling the shots were not only mistaken, but catastrophically mistaken.

Comments from Left Field says:

[I]t’s nice to finally see someone in Washington getting rewarded for being, um, right about something–especially after getting forced out of his position as Army chief of staff for choosing integrity over short-term self interest.  And, as Fallows (who wrote about Shinseki extensively...reveals, “[d]espite being unfairly treated, despite being 100% vindicated by subsequent events, Shinseki kept his grievances entirely to himself.”

My DD:

If Shinseki brings the type of focus and willingness to speak truth to power to the Veterans Affairs that he did to the military, he is going to make a real positive difference in the lives of those who greatly deserve better treatment from our government and be a very solid addition to Barack Obama's cabinet

The Impolitic says:  "Finally. An appointment I can unequivocally cheer."

Taylor Marsh agrees:

Obama deserves full throated praise for such a wise choice at such a moment, at a time when the country and the world are looking for signs about how he will lead as commander in chief. I cannot say enough about the choice of former General Shinseki to head the VA.

The appointment of Shinseki to head the VA is a direct repudiation of the Bush-Cheney administration and its Iraq war policy, as well as the Administrations treatment of the military. There is no single appointment that could have sent a louder message to the current Administration than giving General Shinseki his due. He was correct. His elevation to leader of the VA brings back memories of how he was treated for being so.

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