I HAVE VERY MIXED FEELINGS about this story. The Associated Press has gone to great lengths here to quantify the number of civilian dead as a result of the war. Fine, that is a legitimate thing to want to know.

My heartburn begins, however, when I consider that reporters were in Iraq in the years leading up to this war (remember the CNN Scandal...accused of not reporting the truth in order to maintain "access" to Iraq?) I wonder where was the same zeal and effort to chonicle the estimated 300,000 Iraqi's who simply disappeared at Saddam's hand and now are being uncovered in mass graves.

And Human Rights Watch...where were you? And Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, do you have an adjunct organization called Campaign for Innocent Victims Under Ruthlessly Brutal Dictators?

No? I didn't think so.

The AP's finding: At least 3,240 civilians died throughout the country, including 1,896 in Baghdad. The count is still fragmentary, and the complete number — if it is ever tallied — is sure to be significantly higher.

Several surveys have looked at civilian casualties within Baghdad, but the AP's is the first attempt to gauge the scale of such deaths from one end of the country to the other, from Mosul in the north to Basra in the south...

...In the 1991 Gulf War an estimated 2,278 civilians were killed, Iraqi civil defense authorities said. No official U.S. count is known to have been made. That war consisted of seven weeks of bombing and 100 hours of ground war, and did not take U.S. forces into any Iraqi cities.

This time it was very different. In a war in which Saddam Hussein's soldiers melted away into crowded cities, changed into plain clothes or wore no uniform to begin with, separating civilian and military casualties was often impossible.

Adding to the civilian toll was the regime's tactic of parking its troops and weapons in residential neighborhoods, creating targets for U.S. bombs that increased the casualties among noncombatants...

..."Did the Americans bomb civilians? Yes. But one should be realistic," said Dr. Hameed Hussein al-Aaraji, new director of Baghdad's al-Kindi Hospital. "Saddam ran a dirty war. He put weapons inside schools, inside mosques. What could they do?"

...Some of the best record-keeping was in Baghdad, where AP journalists visited all 24 hospitals that took in war casualties. Their logs provided a count of 1,896 civilians killed. There were certainly more civilians dead. A few hospitals lost count as fighting intensified...

...It will take months or more before anything like a final count emerges. One survey is being done by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, another by the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, which hopes to win U.S. compensation for victims or their relatives.