Splitting the Difference

Eric Shinseki will serve as Obama's Secretary of Veterans Affairs. This should be no surprise as Shinseki seemed to be a political general. His suggestion that hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed to occupy Iraq was a gross exaggeration. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was wrong as well, trying to mount operations on the cheap. Hindsight has acquitted the position of General David Petraeus advanced at some risk forcefully by Senator John McCain of a troop surge to slightly more than 160,000. A cynic might wonder if Shinseki pushed such a high number to dissuade the US liberation of Iraq in the first place. If this was so, Shinseki is being rewarded now.