Innocents are dying by the thousands in Iraq and now we know why.

A little more than a year ago, a group of Johns Hopkins University 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 US 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 Congo in 2000. Though the Congo study had won the praise of the Bush and Blair administrations and had become the foundation for UN Security Council and State Department actions, this study was quickly declared invalid by the US government and supporters of the war.

So what changed? Did this group suddenly lose all credibility? Did the smart researchers all quit and leave in their place the dumber "second string"? No! This is just another example of our government "cherry picking" the information that they want to believe and rejecting anything that shows them in a bad light.

I have written several times about my anger over the loss of innocent lives in Iraq. I have been incensed by our callous attitude toward what he military refers to as "peripheral damage".

This article spells out in no uncertain terms why we have amassed so many civilian casualties during this criminal war. It is worse then I thought.

But in Iraqi cities, US values and priorities are quite differently arranged. The contrast derives from three important principles under which the Iraq war is being fought: that the war should be conducted to absolutely minimize the risk to US troops; that guerrilla fighters should not be allowed to escape if there is any way to capture or kill them; and that Iraqi civilians should not be allowed to harbor or encourage the resistance fighters.

We are familiar with the first principle, the determination to safeguard American soldiers. It is expressed in the elaborate training and equipment they are given, as well as the continuing effort to make the equipment even more effective in protecting them from attack. (This was most recently expressed in the release of a Pentagon study showing that improved body armor could have saved as many as 300 American lives since the start of the war.) It is also expressed in rules of engagement that call for air strikes such as the one in Baiji.

The alternative to such an air attack (aside from allowing the guerrillas to escape) would, of course, be to use a unit of troops to root out the guerrillas. Needless to say, without an effective Iraqi military in place, such an operation would be likely to expose American soldiers to considerable risk. The administration of President George W Bush has long shied away from the high casualty counts that would be an almost guaranteed result of such concentrated, close-quarters urban warfare, casualty counts that would surely have a strong negative effect on support in the United States for its war. (The irony, of course, is that, with air attacks, the US is trading lower American casualties and stronger support domestically for ever-lessening Iraqi support and the ever-greater hostility such attacks bring in their wake.)

This is the part that I have the most trouble reconciling. How is it okay to invade a country and then treat the civilians as if their lives are not worth a damn? We make such a show of building schools and helping them restore the power and water, and then we blow the fuck out of them! Does it not dawn on these assholes that though there might be civilians lending comfort to the terrorists that it might only be one or two individuals who are occupying that building. The remainder of the occupants probably have no idea that they are sharing the building with enemies of America. There is no way to make this okay! There are no excuses for killing so many innocents!

And they do it to protect the lives of our troops. I am all for protecting the troops. But they do not do it because they care about the soldiers, they do it because they fear that if we suffer more casualties the American people will lose their stomach for the conflict and demand that the troops be brought home. That callous disregard for the lives of these people is unconscionable!