A Formula for Slaughter

By Michael Schwartz, Tomdispatch.com. Posted January 12, 2006.

How the U.S. military's new strategy in Iraq guarantees massive civilian casualties, not victory.

A little over a year ago, a group of Johns Hopkins researchers reported that about 100,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a result of the Iraq war during its first 14 months, with about 60,000 of the deaths directly attributable to military violence by the U.S. and its allies.

The study, published in The Lancet, the highly respected British medical journal, applied the same rigorous, scientifically validated methods that the Hopkins researchers had used in estimating that 1.7 million people had died in the Congo in 2000. Though the Congo study had won the praise of the Bush and Blair administrations and had become the foundation for U.N, Security Council and State Department actions, this study was quickly declared invalid by the U.S. government and by supporters of the war.