You have to give the Obama people credit. They are quite adept at slipping the knife in slowly. Obama is appointing retired General Eric Shinseki to be our next secretary of Veterans Affairs. You might recall that Shinseki is the guy who basically canned by Rumsfeld after he testified to Congress that we might need hundreds of thousands of US troops to quell Iraq:
Shinseki's tenure as Army chief of staff from 1999 to 2003 was marked by constant tensions with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which boiled over in 2003 when Shinseki testified to Congress that it might take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to control Iraq after the invasion.Obama is announcing the choice of Shinseki, a Japanese-American, as VA secretary, tomorrow, Sunday, December 7. Pearl Harbor day. Don't think it wasn't intentional. The man who who gave his acceptance speech on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" address leaves nothing to chance.
Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, belittled the estimate as "wildly off the mark" and the army general was ousted within months. But Shinseki's words proved prophetic after President George W. Bush in early 2007 announced a "surge" of additional troops to Iraq after miscalculating the numbers needed to stem sectarian violence.
Obama said he selected Shinseki for the VA post because he "was right" in predicting that the U.S. will need more troops in Iraq than Rumsfeld believed at the time.
