First vilified, then marginalized by the Bush administration after those comments, General Shinseki retired and faded away, even as lawmakers, pundits and politicians increasingly cited his prescience.
“We never had enough troops to begin with,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said just before the president’s televised address. “A month or two ago we found out the Army is broken, and they agreed that General Shinseki was right.”
Gen. John P. Abizaid, the departing commander of American forces in the Middle East, told Congress late last year, “General Shinseki was right that a greater international force contribution, U.S. force contribution and Iraqi force contribution should have been available immediately after major combat operations.”
In his prime-time address on Wednesday, even President Bush said the main reason past efforts to stabilize Baghdad had failed was that “there were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents.”
The acknowledgment was far different from the harsh administration rebuttals after General Shinseki electrified Washington with his blunt warning that victory in Iraq would require more troops than were being deployed for the invasion.
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