Somebody knew

I found this story so disturbing as to be almost beyond belief. According to the Associated Press:

The U.S. government conducted a series of secret war games in 1999 that anticipated an invasion of Iraq would require 400,000 troops, and even then chaos might ensue.

In its "Desert Crossing" games, 70 military, diplomatic and intelligence officials assumed the high troop levels would be needed to keep order, seal borders and take care of other security needs.

The documents came to light Saturday through a Freedom of Information Act request by the George Washington University's National Security Archive, an independent research institute and library.

Think about the implications of this revelation. Put aside for a moment, if you can, the lies of 2002, the exaggerated specter of "mushroom clouds," the misleading conflation of Saddam and al Qaeda, and just ponder the fact that as long as this Administration had already decided to wage war on Iraq, it had information at its disposal about what would and wouldn't work.

Somebody knew - and chose to do the wrong thing anyway.

I mean, surely some member of the Clinton White House or Congress in 1999 was aware of the lessons taught by "Desert Crossing," and, as a matter of course, passed that information along to key members of the incoming Bush Administration.

And someone among the Pentagon's top brass was intimately aware of the "lose-lose" conclusions drawn from those exercises, and still around in March 2003 to point out the underpreparedness - if not outright futility - of America's battle plan to the invasion's architects.

Somebody knew "Operation [Fill-in-the-Blank]" wouldn't work - and sent our young men and women to the slaughter anyway.

This under-reported information is, to me, the most damning piece of evidence against the President and his enablers to date - moreso, even, than the also-under-reported Downing Street Memo. It's bad enough that the Neo-Cons who'd seized power in Washington had designs on Baghdad long before they'd figured out how best to fool the American public into supporting them.

But to think that when their disingenuous PR campaign had succeeded, and they finally had their dirty little war, they decided to do so on the cheap - with full knowledge of strategic conclusions that doomed their "plan" to failure - goes beyond reprehensible all the way to criminally negligent.

Somebody knew that a military operation against Saddam would require three times the number of troops George and Dick and Donny decided to put in harm's way to have even a chance of succeeding - yet they did nothing about it.

Note to Nancy Pelosi: If your dreams come to pass tomorrow, and you regain control of the House, somebody has to be held accountable for the inexcusable shame of Iraq. Somebody has to answer for the demonstrable incompetence and malfeasance that took us there. Somebody has to atone for the travesty of sending our sons and daughters to die, all the while knowing that they were understaffed, underequipped, and underprepared for the realities on the ground.

Somebody knew. And by God, somebody should have to pay.