Shinseki could be next VA secretary

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen retired Gen. Eric K. 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 is expected to formally announce today his selection of Shinseki, 66, the first Japanese American to become a four-star Army general.

“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 choice.

Shinseki’s tenure as Army chief of staff from 1999 to 2003 was marked by constant tension with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that came to a head in February 2003, when Shinseki testified to Congress that it might take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to control Iraq after the invasion. (The invasion began almost one month later and lasted nearly two months.)

Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, belittled the estimate as “wildly off the mark,” and the Army general was ousted within months. But Shinseki proved to be prophetic: In 2007, President Bush said a “surge” of additional troops would be deployed to cope with sectarian strife.

Obama said he selected Shinseki because the general’s troop prediction “was right.”