The civilians of Falluja are negotiating to stave off a threatened US-led military incursion. American military spokesmen insist that US-led forces will do their utmost to spare civilian bystanders. But if they don't, the newly free Iraqi press will have trouble reporting the story. The Iraqi Health Ministry, on orders of the US-backed government, has stopped releasing Iraqi casualty figures to journalists. The ministry's numbers had been turning up in news reports, most notably in a Knight Ridder story on how many Iraqi civilians have been killed in recent fighting, which was widely distributed in the United States.

So the problem of Iraqi civilian casualties reverberates in the troubled US military occupation of Iraq. But what isn't known about ordinary Iraqis dying from US firepower is a big part of that problem. The Pentagon shows no interest in the subject. "We don't do body counts," Gen. Tommy Franks has famously said. And in the chaos of Iraq, reporters and public health authorities simply can't keep track. This isn't just a problem for the Iraqis whose lives are at risk. It's a problem for Americans trying to figure out how the military is going to overcome the hostility it now faces in Iraq.

On the subject of civilian casualties, Americans lack what they usually love: a nice round number that endows an emotional issue with numeric authority. In September the talisman figure of 1,000 US combat deaths became the emblem of growing national doubts about the war in Iraq. But all the experts on Iraqi civilian casualties argue persuasively that there is no comparably accurate figure that might sum up the suffering of the Iraqi people.

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