Gen. Shinseki to head Veterans Affairs, or "Eric was right!"

Obama has named retired General Eric Shinseki to be the head of Veteran's Affairs. What an excellent choice! Here is a clip from the award-winning documentary No End In Sight: Iraq's Descent into Chaos, which reminds us of Shinseki's principled stand before the invasion of Iraq, and the disastarous consequences of a war declared and led by people with NO military experience!

My father spent fifteen years as a doctor in the Army during the Viet Nam war, performing surgery on the seriously wounded, and I grew up surrounded by the awareness of life-threatening injuries and the long and painful recovery from them. I lived for years in Berkeley where veterans of the war often ended up living on the streets because of inadequate attention to their needs. This, along with my study of U.S. military history in Latin America (both covert and direct), have led me to despise the political leaders who have ordered or condoned such actions with little regard for the cost to military personnel and civilians. It has also led me to have little patience for the public and media support of the seven years of this ill-advised war. The scandals about the shoddy and substandard service given to veterans under the Bush administration, are a national shame.

It is precisely for that reason that those who serve in the military as professionals with integrity are needed to help us fix this mess. I note with interest that this career military man (West Point, etc) has an MA in English literature from Duke University). I wish I could find out more information about that! My cynical army-brat heart feels hope that this appointment will bring substantive change.

James Fallow gives us the details on how Shinseki warned civilian leaders that if we went into Iraq we would need to have hundreds of thousands of troops to ensure security and control. When he retired, four months after war was declared, he had been publicly rebuked for this stand. As he demonstrated in his Atlantic Monthly articles at the time, (collected as Blind Into Baghdad, an excellent account of how we screwed up the beginning of the war that never should have started in the first place) Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who were in favor of a fantasy video-game style army, publicly rebuked and attempted to humiliate him. I say attempted, because Shinseki has shown exemplary integrity in refusing to ever comment on the conduct of the war, never earning a penny on the pundit circle saying "I told you so" or in any way bad-mouthing the institution he served for decades, having been wounded in Viet Nam. All this in spite of, or rather because of the fact that he had an uncle who served in WWII as one of the many Japanese-American soldiers who served in spite of the fact that the U.S. had interned them and their families in camps.

Let us hope that this former Army chief of staff, who enjoys the respect of his Army colleagues, will be able to do what it takes to shake up and modernize Veterans Affairs in such a way that all those whose bodies and minds have been shattered by their war experiences receive the care, support and understanding they and their families need.