Killing from above

The US air war in Iraq is virtually ignored in the Western media. Michael Schwartz, Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the Undergraduate College of Global Studies at Stony Brook University, offers a sobering account of this hidden aggression:

"Consider then this gruesome arithmetic: If the U.S. fulfils its expectation of surpassing 150 air attacks per month, and if the average air strike produces the (gruesomely) modest total of 10 fatalities, air power alone could kill well over 20,000 Iraqi civilians in 2006. Add the ongoing (but reduced) mortality due to other military causes on all sides, and the 1,000 civilian deaths per week rate recorded by the Hopkins study could be dwarfed in the coming year.

"The new American strategy, billed as a way to de-escalate the war, is actually a formula for the slaughter of Iraqi civilians."