While the US death toll in Iraq continues to provide fodder for US headline writers, the genteel mainstream news reports have given Iraqi lives lost during the war considerably less attention.

An Associated Press tally showed the US death toll passed 1,000 on Tuesday nearly 18 months after American-led forces invaded the country to topple the government of former President Saddam Hussein.

The count includes 998 US troops and three civilian contractors killed while working for the Pentagon.

Any way you look at it, the news is bad enough.

This, no doubt, is a tragedy for the men killed and their families, and a problem for the White House.

But there is much fanfare over the fact that the latest US combat death in Iraq pushed the official total to more than 1,000.

Still, the death toll from the other side remains muffled. It is rarely reported by the media, especially in the West.

Researchers involved in independent surveys estimate that more than 10,000 Iraqis have been killed since the war was launched in March 2003.

The surveyors' warnings, preliminary reports from hospitals, morgues, mosques, and homes point to a level of civilian casualties far exceeding the Gulf War.

Such a figure would make the Iraq war the deadliest campaign for non-combatants that US forces have fought since Viet Nam.

"Thousands are dead, thousands are missing, thousands are captured," says Haidar Taie, head of the tracing department for the Iraqi Red Crescent in Baghdad. "It is a big disaster."

By one measure of violence against non-combatants, as compared with resistance faced by soldiers, the war in Iraq was particularly brutal.

US and British military officials insisted throughout the war that their forces did all they could to avoid civilian casualties. But it has become clear since the fighting ended that bombs did go astray, that targets were chosen in error, and that as US troops pushed rapidly north towards the capital they killed thousands of civilians from the air and from the ground.

With each and every US casualty counted, has the United States ever bothered to give even a rough account of Iraqi lives lost during its war of "liberation?"