President-elect Barack Obama has chosen retired Gen. Eric K. Shinseki to be the next secretary of Veterans Affairs, turning to a former Army chief of staff once vilified by the Bush administration for questioning its Iraq war strategy shortly before the U.S. invasion.
Obama will announce the selection of Shinseki, 66, the first four-star Army 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.
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 February 2003 when Shinseki testified to Congress that it might take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to control Iraq after an invasion.
Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, belittled the estimate as "wildly off the mark," and the army general was forced out within months.
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