David Corn: "This reminds me of a pet issue I adopted during the Afghanistan war. At that time, the Bush administration and the Pentagon often refused to acknowledge civilian casualties. Time and time again, a bomb would end up blasting apart a home, a business, a wedding reception, and men, women and children would be blown to bits. Rather than admit wrong, the Pentagon routinely denied any such thing had happened, often claiming that all its ordnance had fallen upon Taliban fighters and no one else. Reporters would then visit these sites, talk to eyewitnesses and local leaders (who usually were anti-Taliban) and discover that the allegations of misguided (and lethal) bombing were quite credible. Meanwhile, the Pentagon would ignore or misrepresent the facts as long as it could. On rare occasions, it might concede something had gone wrong. Then, the Bush administration would do nothing to make it up to the innocent victims. Concurrently, reports of the bombings and dead civilians would be broadcast far and wide through the Muslim and Arab worlds--often in far more explicit detail than an American would see within the US media. It's arguable that these images and reports had much to do with souring (or further souring) much of the Islamic world on the United States."

David has a true and serious critique here. Unfortunately, there is also little tracking, by year/month/week of the civilians murdered by Saddam. The failure to track civilian deaths then doesn't eliminate the correctness of tracking civilian deaths now, but it does muddy the issue some.

Civilian deaths is a negative to war; it's also a negative to non-war in China, Iran, Sudan, and Iraq under Saddam. Unless there is more call to track civ deaths in the other problematic areas, the conclusion is that this complaint is just more Bush-hate.