After the humiliating rebuke by Paul Wolfowitz (who never served in the military), for daring stand up to Donald Rumsfeld (who also never served in the military) and insist that we needed more troops on the ground in Iraq, Shinseki has been appointed to head Veterans Affairs by Obama. For more on the disgraceful manner in which General Shinseki was treated please read James Fallows in The Atlantic.
The showdown came just before the war began. Shinseki, who had direct experience with land warfare (in Vietnam) and post-combat occupation (in the Balkans), was urging that the U.S. go in with a force large enough to ensure that it could maintain order and genuinely control Iraq’s sizable territory and potentially fractious society after it ousted Saddam. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz hated this whole idea.
Rumsfeld rightly suffered his own well deserved disgrace when he was forced out of office after the GOP were slaughtered during the 2006 election cycle. That slaughter being widely attributed to the poor handling of the Iraq war as envisioned in Rumsfeld’s ‘lighter, faster, deadlier’ doctrine which turned out to be a disaster.
