The toll rises. And rises. And rises.

The Bush administration and their cheering section have spent considerable time and energy publicly patting themselves on the back for the reportedly low rate of civilian deaths during the latest war in Iraq. Or rather, formerly reportedly low. The Christian Science Monitor reported today that a much more unpleasant picture has begun to emerge.

Evidence is mounting to suggest that between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi civilians may have died during the recent war, according to researchers involved in independent surveys of the country. None of the local and foreign researchers were willing to speak for the record, however, until their tallies are complete. Such a range would make the Iraq war the deadliest campaign for noncombatants that US forces have fought since Vietnam. Though it is still too early for anything like a definitive estimate, the surveyors warn, preliminary reports from hospitals, morgues, mosques, and homes point to a level of civilian casualties far exceeding the Gulf War, when 3,500 civilians are thought to have died.

[...]

A full accounting could take months, says CIVIC coordinator Marla Ruzicka, and the group is still compiling its data. But its volunteers have already recorded more than 1,000 civilian deaths in the southern town of Nasariyah, and almost as many in the capital. "In Baghdad, we have discovered 1,000 graves, and that is not the final figure," says Ali Ismail, a Red Crescent official. "Every day we discover more" where local residents say civilians were buried. Researchers say they have found particularly high levels of civilian casualties along the Euphrates River, between Nasariyah and Najaf, where US Marines fought their way toward Baghdad.

The administration tried desperately (and successfully) to convince the American public that this war was a response to the 2001 terrorist attacks, despite the fact that no evidence existed to link Iraq in any way to those events. Outrage over the loss of roughly 3000 innocent American lives was leveraged into support for a military operation that took at least twice as many innocent lives in a country that was utterly unrelated to the attacks.

There are no estimates of military deaths, but they are surely much higher. And that speaks to a larger issue that has troubled me since the beginning of the war: I understand why people make a distinction between the two, but how valid of a distinction is it in a country with a mostly conscript army? Those thousands of invisible Iraqi soldiers were people with children and wives and parents and friends, and we are talking about thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of shattered families. And as Russell Smith writes in the NY Review of Books, the media blithely adopted the Pentagon's linguistic avoidance of this fact.

CNN was more irritating than the gleefully patriotic Fox News channel because CNN has a pretense of objectivity. It pretends to be run by journalists. And yet it dutifully uses all the language chosen by people in charge of "media relations" at the Pentagon. It describes the exploding of Iraqi soldiers in their bunkers as "softening up"; it describes slaughtered Iraqi units as being "degraded"; some announcers have even repeated the egregious Pentagon neologism "attrited" (to mean "we are slowly killing as many of them as we can"). I don't know if I'm more offended by the insidiousness of this euphemism or by the absurdity of its grammar.

To recite from a Pentagon press release that an Iraqi division has been "degraded by 70 percent" is an astounding abdication of journalistic responsibility. A journalist these days must not just report the facts, but also explain the news, give it color and significance. The graphic reality of "degradation" is a large pile of dismembered bodies. Surely some picture or explanation of what the wiping out of an entire division with high explosives actually looks like is called for.

Many readers and watchers of the news were baffled as the battle for Baghdad came suddenly upon us without any large-scale engagement with the dreaded Republican Guard. What happened to those three or five divisions that were supposedly ringing the city? The facts of their destruction were grudgingly mentioned almost in passing. They were destroyed from the air. This did not make a glamorous or even central story to anyone's coverage of this war, because there were no embedded reporters with the Iraqi troops. It's hard to get a TV camera into a line of trenches that is being puréed by bombs. Instead of reporting that this peripeteia in the war's narrative was happening, and that it entailed thousands of deaths leading to the rapid collapse of the Iraqi regime, the television and the press simply downsized the story. No pictures, no story. This is the real meaning of "degradation."

Rumsfeld boasts of our "precision bombing" but makes no mention of the extensive use of cluster bombs in civilian areas - decidedly imprecise bombs that send shrapnel over an area the size of a football field. These are the same bombs that have left unexploded bomblets scattered across Iraq and continue to kill and mutilate children. He speaks of eliminating WMD threats, but ignores the depleted uranium shells that showered a dry, windy country with radioactive dust - shells that have in the past shown to be contaminated with plutonium, a substance 100,000 times more toxic than uranium.

In other words, even as high as the death toll has been so far, it has not finished climbing. That doesn't even take into consideration the present and future avoidable deaths resulting from the collapse of the Iraqi medical system and the inaccessability of clean drinking water. So before any of us join in the government's orgy of self-congratulation for their "humane" war, we should examine just how humanitarian the situation actually is. And CNN, MSNBC, and FoxNews are utterly unreliable examiners of that. They now bear more than a passing resemblance to Brezhnev-era Pravda.