So the New York Times sums up the results of a recently concluded study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health:

“Civilian deaths have risen dramatically in Iraq since the country was invaded in March 2003, according to a survey conducted by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Columbia University School of Nursing and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. The researchers found that the majority of deaths were attributed to violence, which were primarily the result of military actions by Coalition forces. Most of those killed by Coalition forces were women and children. However, the researchers stressed that they found no evidence of improper conduct by the Coalition soldiers.”

Saddam could only dream so big. So much for the pathetic “humanitarian” rationalizations for the war.

(Thanks to Rob Sica and Bill Edmundson for the pointers.)

UPDATE: A couple of folks pointed out to me that the 100,000 figure is simply the midpoint on a very large range of 8,000 to 194,000 excess deaths. While the confidence interval on that range is very high (95%), the range is too large to make the midpoint informative in this case. (Note that the range would be even higher if they had included Falluja, which they did not for purposes of this figure.) There is a useful discussion of what conclusions the study does support here.