Shinseki selected for Veteran Affairs

Politico:

Retired Army Gen. Eric Shinseki will be named as Barack Obama's Secretary of Veterans' Affairs Sunday afternoon in Chicago.

The surprise pick adds yet another heavyweight to the Obama cabinet, and also takes a not-so-subtle slap at President Bush's original national security team.

Shinseki served as Chief of Staff of the Army and retired a four-star general in 2003. Like Obama a native of Hawaii, Shinseki served two combat tours in Vietnam, where he earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. Shinseki, who is of Japanese ancestry, becomes the first Asian-American in the new Cabinet.

He rose to prominence—and become something of a hero to the anti-war left— after he clashed with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz personally and professionally, especially on the Iraq war.

Shortly before the end of his term as Chief of Staff in 2003, Shinseki told a congressional committee that post-war Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops. Both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz publicly scoffed at the estimate— a rare public rebuff to one of the nation's most senior generals. When Shinseki retired, no senior civilians from the Pentagon showed at his ceremony.

Iraq war critics later said it was Shinseki, not Rumsfeld, who turned out to be right about the need for more troops after U.S. forces suffered heavy losses in the post-war insurgency.

In an interview to air tomorrow, Obama praised Shinseki's judgement on the war.

"He was right," Obama told NBC's Tom Brokaw in a "Meet the Press" interview taped here Saturday, excerpts of which were released tonight by the network.

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I think Shinseki can probably do a good job at Veteran Affairs and wish him well. However the antiwar left is way off base on the dispute between Rumsfeld and Shinseki. First Shinseki made an off the cuff assessment based on a question he had not prepared for. His estimate was around 400,000 troops.

I have been one who also thought we had an inadequate number of troops in Iraq at some points. However, even with the surge we never had half as many troops as Shinseki suggested. What the antiwar left liked about the 400,000 number was that they hoped it would preclude the liberation of Iraq since it was not likely we would have that many troops available because of the Clinton cuts.

For Obama to say that Shinseki was right shows just how clueless he is about military operations in Iraq. The Democrats have been using Shinseki as a prop in their desperate attempt to lose the war. It is dishonest and it is disingenuous. We now know that we won the war in Iraq with substantially fewer troops than Shinseki estimated. We did it with a change in strategy in how the troops were used and with the addition of several thousand Iraqi troops.