WASHINGTON — President- elect Barack Obama has chosen retired Gen. Eric Shinseki to be the next veterans affairs secretary, turning to a former Army chief of staff once vilified by the Bush administration for questioning its Iraq war strategy.
Obama will announce the selection of Shinseki, the first Army four-star general of Japanese-American ancestry, at a news conference today in Chicago. He will be the first Asian-American to hold the post of veterans affairs secretary, adding to the growing diversity of Obama’s Cabinet.
“I think that Gen. Shinseki is exactly the right person who is going to be able to make sure that we honor our troops when they come home,” Obama said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” to be broadcast today.
NBC released a transcript of the interview after The Associated Press reported that Shinseki was Obama’s pick.
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.
Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, belittled the estimate as “wildly off the mark,” and the army general was forced out within months.
But Shinseki’s words proved prophetic after President 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 thought.
Shinseki, 66, will take the helm of the government’s second -largest agency, which has been roundly criticized during the Bush administration for underestimating the amount of funding needed to treat thousands of injured veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thousands of veterans endure six-month waits for receiving disability benefits, despite promises by current VA Secretary James Peake and his predecessor, Jim Nicholson, to reduce delays. The department also is scrambling to upgrade government technology systems before new legislation providing for millions of dollars in new GI benefits takes effect in August.
Shinseki, who grew up in Hawaii, is a recipient of two Purple Hearts for life-threatening injuries in Vietnam.
Upon leaving his post in June 2003, Shinseki in his farewell speech sternly warned against arrogance in leadership.
“You must love those you lead before you can be an effective leader,” he said. “You can certainly command without that sense of commitment, but you cannot lead without it.”
