IT'S ALMOST AS IF some people want Iraqi civilians to die. So eager are they to score political points that you can almost see them licking their chops as they desperately seek out any reports--however sketchy--of Iraqi casualties. For their political agenda, the only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi.

I'm talking, of course, about the small but heavily publicized portion of the antiwar movement that predicts and counts civilian casualties.

First, the predictors: Medact, the British affiliate of the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, released a study last November predicting a total death toll of somewhere between 48,000 and 261,000, with up to 200,000 additional deaths from "indirect and longer-term adverse health effects of the war in Iraq." Medact predicted that between 3,200 and 80,000 (when in doubt, go for a wide range!) of the initial deaths would be civilians, and presumably almost all of the later 200,000 would. (Medact also suggested that, in the event of an Iraqi chemical or biological attack, either the United States or Israel might nuke Baghdad, killing between 300,000 and 3.9 million, mostly civilians.)

Another prediction, a leaked confidential report by a U.N. humanitarian aid specialist, foresaw 500,000 Iraqi civilian casualties from U.S. action, but didn't speculate on how many would be fatal.

And on almost any street in Oxford, one can see the posters passed out by the British chapter of Amnesty International, entitled "Iraq: The Human Costs of War." The poster, which is careful to cover itself

But far worse is a group that claims to be keeping an accurate running count of Iraqi civilian deaths but is, in fact, doing no such thing. The group is called the Iraq Body Count Project, and its main figure is Marc Herold, a professor of economics and women's studies at the University of New Hampshire. You may remember Herold from his similar project during the Afghanistan campaign. There, he produced a figure of almost 3,800 civilian casualties, and his methodology was immediately criticized by many for taking reports from unreliable media sources at face value and for double-counting some incidents. An independent analysis by the Los Angeles Times found 1,200 or fewer civilian casualties.

Unbowed, Herold turned his attention to the Iraq Body Count Project. The Project's website has a continuously updated "maximum" and "minimum" count. The problem is that the minimum is anything but. As the Project's methodology page explains, "The minimum can be zero if there is a report of 'zero deaths' from two of our sources. 'Unable to confirm any deaths' or similar wording (as in an official statement) does NOT amount to a report of zero, and will NOT lead to an entry of '0' in the minimum column." In other words, suppose the Iraqi Information Minister said, "Today the imperialist aggressors slaughtered 300 innocent Iraqi children." Reputable news outlets will report what the Minister said, while simultaneously reporting that they were unable to confirm it and that the Pentagon was unable to confirm it.