(HOST) Commentator Bill Seamans says that – finally – things may be starting to look up for U.S. veterans.
(SEAMANS) When Barack Obama named Gen. Eric Shinseki as his nominee to head the Department of Veterans Affairs it was the biggest morale boost the VA has experienced in recent years. The shameful way our veterans’ problems have been handled is a scandal that has been endlessly talked about but not yet resolved. Why? When all the excuses are pushed aside we see the lack of leadership and political support as the most culpable reasons. Shinseki’s brass-knuckle attitude and Obama’s stated determination to fix the VA promise better days ahead. Obama said, "Both he and I share a reverence for those who serve." And I might add, so do we the people.
For Shinseki it is a long deserved honor after the deplorable way he was treated for disputing the Bush administration’s plans to invade Iraq with a relatively small force. He said that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed to maintain postwar stability in Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that figure would "prove to be high." Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz charged that Shinseki was "way off the mark." For courageously speaking out Shinseki was relieved as Army Chief of Staff and ridiculed by those who supported Bush’s intentions. Eventually he resigned and the postwar disaster in Iraq proved that he was painfully right.
Shinseki, a Japanese-American born in Hawaii as was Obama, is a West Point graduate who was seriously wounded in Vietnam and commanded Nato in Bosnia. Colin Powell called him "a superb choice who knows soldiers and knows what it takes to keep faith with the men and women who went forth to serve the nation." Shinseki will face the huge problems of a sprawling Veterans’ Administration with 240,000 employees mired in an archaic bureaucracy. A new billion dollar state-of-the-art computer system is needed to speed up the handling of veterans’ care. He faces an essentially political battle for more VA money and the need to protect it from being syphoned off. It is now a discretionary budget item which is vulnerable to being partially diverted to other uses for political reasons. Veterans want the annual VA budget changed to an untouchable mandatory allotment. It’s expected Shinseki also will fight for making VA care more accessible with more local clinics like the one recently announced for Brattleboro as well as a VA medical credit card that could be used for higher level care at local hospitals.
We hope that Gen. Eric Shinseki will succeed in helping fulfill our morale obligation to fix as much as possible the lives of the men and women we have sent into harm’s way. It looks like a good start. And good news for veterans.