Body Count
Much has been made of the 1,000+ military deaths in Iraq (and, to a lesser extent, the more than 7,000 casualties), but little has been made in this country about the deaths and casualties suffered by the Iraqi populace. Salon's War Room blog has some statistics:

It's become conventional wisdom, cited by pundits on both the left and the right, that if reelected, the Bush administration will launch an offensive against Fallujah and other insurgent-held cities in Iraq. If that's the case, thousands of innocent Iraqis will almost certainly soon be dead.

Recently, the American press has been full of stories about the more than 1,000 U.S. troops killed in Iraq. There's been far less attention, though, paid to thousands of Iraqi men, women and children killed during the American occupation. They're being cut down by Iraqi insurgents -- but also by the American counterinsurgency, which has taken to bombing and strafing densely populated areas, tactics virtually guaranteed to kill innocents.

[...]

The American military doesn't keep track of civilian casualties, and reliable figures are hard to come by. George Lopez, a senior fellow at Joan B. Kroc Institute at the University of Notre Dame, who has been diligently researching the civilian toll in Iraq, says he trusts the numbers on the Iraq Body Count website, which estimates that at least 12,800 and as many as 14,843 Iraqi civilians have been killed during the war and occupation.

[...]

Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley cites Iraq Body Count's relatively "conservative" estimates in a roundup Tuesday of international press coverage of Iraq casualties. He notes that "overseas reporters and commentators emphasize the issue more than their American counterparts and play up civilian casualties in ways the U.S. media rarely pursue."

Juan Cole also tries to put it into a perspective that's closer to home:

President Bush said Tuesday that the Iraqis are refuting the pessimists and implied that things are improving in that country.

What would America look like if it were in Iraq's current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.

Thus, violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, the equivalent proportionately of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were Iraq, it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll.

And what if those deaths occurred all over the country, including in the capital of Washington, DC, but mainly above the Mason Dixon line, in Boston, Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco?

[...]

What if, during the past year, the Secretary of State (Aqilah Hashemi), the President (Izzedine Salim), and the Attorney General (Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim) had all been assassinated?

What if all the cities in the US were wracked by a crime wave, with thousands of murders, kidnappings, burglaries, and carjackings in every major city every year?

[...]

What if the leader of the European Union maintained that the citizens of the United States are, under these conditions, refuting pessimism and that freedom and democracy are just around the corner?

But the blame for Iraqi casualities can't be solely attributed to U.S. or British armed forces; here's a view from the ground from a BBC correspondent:

The problem is that very few people are actively supporting the fight against the militants.

A vicious campaign of intimidation doesn't help matters.

Last month, five cleaning ladies at a British base were murdered on their way to work.

Two local translators disappeared. Their severed heads were found outside the front gate.

But perhaps the most worrying development of the August fighting was that none of Basra's 25,000 police officers came to the aid of the British soldiers. Some even helped the gunmen.

I met one of the senior civilian political advisors to the military command.

Every time he came to Basra things seemed a "step change worse", he said.

The best thing to happen, he went on, would be for a new Islamic government to be elected in January which would ask multi-national forces to leave.

I don't think he was being facetious.