DiRita’s basic argument is that Shinseki’s reputation is constructed around a “myth” of resistence to the Bush administration. It’s a curious argument — the mouthpiece for the former secretary of defense is actually arguing that Shinseki should have dissented more from his ex-boss’s ludicruous and irresponsible proposals if he wants to be considered truly a dissenter. But this is just an outright lie:

Shinseki was not forced from office. He retired on time in June 2003, with the full honors due a retiring chief of staff of the U.S. Army.

What DiRita is hoping you don’t understand is that Rumsfeld announced over a year before Shinseki’s scheduled retirement that he was in the market for a new Army chief of staff after the two men tousled over an Army artillery system. It was a typically classy and productive way to handle things. DiRita might be literally correct that Shinseki wasn’t formally fired, but the actual context of what happened makes his statement have the same relationship to the truth as most of his official statements from the Pentagon press shop. Here’s how ret. Gen. Paul van Riper described the reaction to Rumsfeld’s premature cashiering of Shinseki:

I know of nothing, other than the failure to plan adequately for the war in Iraq, that upset the retired community nearly as much as Mr. Rumsfeld’s treatment of the chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Shinseki. Just irate. I’ve been in meetings and breakfasts and lunch where this is a subject of conversation and just a very, very bitter feeling that he would treat someone like that.

The idea that DiRita is interested in the truth is just too absurd to take seriously. What rankles him is that Shinseki was right and Rumsfeld was wrong, and everyone knows it. This effort to get people to believe DiRita instead of their own lying eyes is an artifact of the Bush era that most people are happy to see drift off into the distance on another month and five days.

First, and unavoidably, the appointment of Gen. Eric Shinseki to head the Veterans Affairs Dept. is a reminder of just how repudiated Rumsfeld is. One of the best pieces ever written about the Rumsfeld era came long before the Iraq war. In the New Yorker in August of 2002, Peter J. Boyer mined the depths of disagreement between Rumsfeld and the Army over the future of U.S. ground forces. As Army chief of staff, Shinseki was an advocate of significant ground-force transformation away from a ponderous, mechanized force and toward something lighter and more deployable — he’d tell his subordinates, “If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance a lot less” — and you’d have thought that Rumsfeld would enlist Shinseki as a natural uniformed ally for what was, ostensibly, the same goal. But no.

Unfortunately, the piece is behind a subscriber-only firewall, but here’s an excerpt, harvested from Nexis. [Update: Avi Zenilman at the New Yorker has lifted the firewall! Here's the piece.]

[T]he advent of the Bush team opened a second front with which Shinseki has had to contend. Not only does he have to persuade the Army to transform, he also has to argue for the Army’s utility in war. At the heart of this argument is the belief that no technological wizardry can eliminate the risks of close combat, and that even the new, unconventional conflicts that loom will ultimately hinge on the skill, commitment, and courage of the American soldier.

And it’s clear in Iraq and Afghanistan who was right and who was wrong. One tragic irony of the Iraq war — among many — is that in the fall of 2006, Rumsfeld went to tell the families of the 172nd Stryker Brigade that its tour of duty in Iraq would be extended, an anguished moment that was captured on video and uploaded to YouTube. Rumsfeld called the Strykers “the best, most capable, most mobile unit” around. The Strykers were the brainchild of Shinseki  and were used when Rumsfeld’s pet theories about the irrelevance of ground power were disproven.

Speaking of ground power, it’s clear from Bob Gates’ recent comments — and, for that matter, his tenure at the Pentagon to date — that Gates views ground power not as a quaint relic of outmoded warfare but the key to victory in the conflicts of the future. When he writes in Foreign Affairs that it’s ludicrous to think “it is possible to cow, shock, or awe an enemy into submission,” he’s clearly got his predecessor’s preferred visions in mind.

Today, for instance, they’ll be another example of this.  Gen. William S. Wallace will step down as the commander of the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command at Ft. Monroe, Va., where over the past three years he’s overseen and nurtured such ground-force doctrinal shifts as the new Army field manuals on counterinsurgency and stability operations and the creation of the U.S. Army/Marine Corps COIN Center. Wallace is perhaps most famous, though, for a comment he gave when commanding a division during the invasion of Iraq that ran into unexpectedly tough resistance from a Saddamist guerilla force. “The enemy we’re fighting is different from the one we wargamed against,” Wallace told The New York Times. It was Rumsfeld, of course, who forced his assumptions about the shape of the Iraq war onto the Army.

Gates will speak at the change-of-command ceremony — another indication of the end of the Rumsfeld era.