Not Far From The Mark: Shinseki To Be Named VA Secretary

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.

As James Fallows has noted, Shinseki's 2003 testimony to Congress about the need for several hundred thousand ground troops in Iraq was shaped by his identity as a logistics guy, the conflict in the Balkans and by the Army's belief that a long occupation would inevitably follow a surgical military action.

So -- Shinseki got it right, and for the right reason. Other generals got it right, too, and quietly resigned before the war began. Shinseki was thrust into public spotlight.

Shinseki was fired in 2003. His name, so far as I can tell, was on no-one's radar screen for any cabinet post.

Shinseki, a Japanese-American, had relatives who fought on the American side in World War II. He was the first Asian-American four star.

When Obama was elected to the Senate, he asked to be on the Veterans Affairs committee, much to the surprise of some on his staff. In late 2006, Obama aide Robert Gibbs told me that one of his boss's top legislative priorities that next year would be an overhaul of VA health care. (At the time, Gibbs and other Obama advisers were participating in very preliminary discussions about a presidential run, but no one, Gibbs included, expect it to happen.)

I asked Gibbs what Obama considered to be his greatest accomplishment of his first two years. Probably, he said, working with Dick Durbin to persuade the federal government to revise its disability care standards to extend the umbrella of coverage of thousands of Illinois veterans. Obama authored legislation to provide more money to help soldiers with traumatic brain injuries and wrote an amendment to increase funding for homeless vets. 

During the presidential campaign, Obama proposed $4 billion in new spending on veterans health care.

For more about Shinseki in the Atlantic, read Jason Vest's 2001 piece on military transformation and Fallows's classic, tragic, award-winning cover story on the occuaption of Iraq.

News of the appointment was first reported by the Associated Press and Reuters.