The call came in an open letter to the premier made available to Reuters and signed by over 40 diplomats, peers, scientists and churchmen.

Any totaling of the Iraqi civilian war dead could embarrass Blair ahead of a general election expected next May [2005] in a country that mostly opposed the U.S.- led war.

Britain and the United States have suffered around 1,070 military losses in the war since it began in March 2003 but the countrywide casualty count is not known. [Website note: this figure, already a baffling under-estimate, does not include casualties to the "civilian contractors" and other coalition forces in Iraq, or the 25,000 seriously injured occupying troops.]

Blair, however, said he saw no need for an inquiry.

"Figures from the Iraqi Ministry of Health, which are a survey from the hospitals there, are in our view the most accurate survey there is," he told parliament.
[Website note: How absurd. How many Iraqi civilians obligingly went to hospital before dying?.]

Defense Minister Geoff Hoon, visiting British troops in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, stressed that Iraqis themselves were best placed to get the necessary data.

"We want the Iraqi authorities to be in a position to provide that information so that we can all have an accurate picture of what is going on," he told BBC radio.

Iraq's health ministry has said 3,853 civilians were killed between April and October this year but critics say the lack of figures for the previous period makes a full tally imperative.

The signatories urged Blair to commission an urgent probe and keep counting so long as British soldiers were in Iraq.

"Your government is obliged under international humanitarian law to protect the civilian population during military operations in Iraq, and you have consistently promised to do so," they wrote in the letter.
"However, without counting the dead and injured, no one can know whether Britain and its coalition partners are meeting these obligations."

Signatories included Air Marshal Sir Timothy Garden, who spent 32 years in the military; Sir Stephen Egerton, a former British ambassador to Iraq; human rights campaigner Bianca Jagger and the Bishop of Oxford Richard Harris.

In a report released in October by the Lancet medical journal, days before the U.S. election that returned President Bush to power, a group of American scientists put civilian deaths at 100,000.

But the Iraq Body Count (IBC) -- an Anglo-American research group tracking civilian deaths via numerous sources -- has come up with a much lower figure of about 14,000-16,000