TIME: Praise for Shinseki ‘needs to be calibrated’
TIME’s Mark Thompson writes today that praise for Shinseki “needs to be calibrated.”
“While he believed that more troops were needed in post-invasion Iraq, he didn’t believe it strongly enough to lay down his four stars and resign. His supporters tend to overlook just how meek his public challenge to Rumsfeld was. He never volunteered it. Senator Carl Levin had to extract it from him, slowly and painfully, during a Senate hearing.”
Some explanation can be found in part of a profile summary on nytimes.com: “He has drawn criticism from people who thought he should have pushed his warning on Iraq more forcefully, even though as Army chief of staff he was not in the chain of command for conducting the war.”
Asked about the criticism in April 2006, Shinseki told Newsweek, “Probably that’s fair. Not my style.”
CNN's McIntyre disputes Shinseki record | Eric Shinseki on December 9th, 2008
[...] bias towards him, reading pieces like McIntyre’s and the one by TIME’s Mark Thompson (previous post) makes me defensive. It also made me wonder if I should even post negative articles on this site. [...]