You can easily imagine the smirk on the face of His InstaPunditNess, Glenn Reynolds, as he typed the following into his MSNBC blog on April 8 (scroll down):

The latest Iraqi claim I could find was for 500 civilian casualties and it’s almost surely inflated. Various antiwar groups are claiming to keep count, but their numbers, as several different commentators have observed, appear to be bogus. So I think it’s very possible that Iraqi civilian casualties, too, will turn out to be under 500.

Knight-Ridder now has some rather different numbers:

The battle for Baghdad cost the lives of at least 1,101 Iraqi civilians, many of them women and children, according to records at the city's 19 largest hospitals.

The civilian death toll was almost certainly higher. The hospital records say that an additional 1,255 dead were "probably" civilians, including many women and children. Uncounted others never made it to hospitals and now lie in shallow graves throughout the city - in cemeteries, yards, hospital gardens, parks and mosque grounds.

More than 6,800 civilians were wounded, the hospital records show.

Note that that's just Baghdad.

The Baghdad death toll also does not include the hundreds of civilians who died in other parts of Iraq. Tabulations have not been made in many of Iraq's cities, but available information indicates that hundreds of civilians died during the U.S. assault. In Najaf, for example, the Najaf Teaching Hospital reported that it had recorded 286 civilian dead and 57 military dead.

And note that -- needless to say -- many of the dead never got to the ER:

Ameer K. Daher, a general surgeon who was trapped near his home by the fighting, noted that many people never made it to hospitals. He recalled that when cluster bombs smashed nearby houses, he and his neighbors set up a field hospital in a secondary school.

"We buried 10 people in the mosque and treated 45 more with what supplies we had in our homes," he said. "We were not the only people forced to do this."

(By the way, Iraq Body Count, often dismissed as the wildly inaccurate work of America-haters, currently estimates that between 2197 and 2670 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of U.S. military action. Those numbers aren't very different from Knight-Ridder's -- which, I should point out, don't attempt to distinguish which side was responsible for each death. To me that's moot: combat took place because we initiated it.)