Q. General, besides the various installations we have talked about that we're bombing, are we dropping bombs on Iraqi infantry brigades or other troops?

A. [From General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Allow me to duck that for the time being.

Whatever else it accomplished, the outbreak of Operation Desert Storm struck onlookers as a surpassing marvel: a tiptoeing whirlwind, bloodless belligerency. The enormous firepower loosed in air raids on Iraq caused, according to early reports, only a smattering of civilian deaths. If that seemed strange, the sense of unreality was heightened by the release of videotapes taken by U.S. Stealth fighters over Baghdad. Images of laser-guided bombs sailing slap on target into a ventilation shaft, followed by the building's soundless obliteration, produced the feel of combat found in a Nintendo game.

An antiseptic war? Or was the surgical face of battle, 1991 style, a mask over the familiar maw of death? The high command of the U.S.-led alliance offered few insights. In a press conference the day after Desert Storm was launched, General Powell repeatedly declined to estimate casualties. As far as Iraqi civilians went, his reluctance seemed justified: impossible to tell from the air, casualties could be gauged only by Iraq's own, doubtful figures (23 deaths in the first wave of assaults, according to preliminary reports in Baghdad) or by the guesswork of foreign correspondents on the scene. And yet Powell also dodged queries about the toll in Iraqi trenches.

Contrasts with the last television war--Vietnam--could not have been more striking. In that chaotic enterprise, TV watchers were treated to point-blank bloodshed at the dinner table every night. Fighting an insurgency, moreover, meant that the Pentagon could not measure progress by battles won and territory gained--hence the emphasis on Viet Cong body counts. Public skepticism about those inflated numbers surely contributed to today's policy of restraint in the gulf. But war with Iraq produced another reason for downplaying death. Washington does not want to inflame Arab opinion against the U.S. Although he hoped that Iraqis might rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein, President Bush recognized that Arabs elsewhere are keenly sensitive about the idea of a Western power inflicting heavy casualties on their brethren.

Because those sensitivities might extend to soldiers, spokesmen for the alliance withheld their estimates even of Iraqi military casualties--though two U.S. officials privately described them as "serious" and "major." On the record the vocabulary tends to be technical, even euphemistic. Alliance commanders referred to "collateral damage"--a term meaning dead or wounded civilians who should have picked a safer neighborhood. As the war continues, the facts--if not the official lingo--are certain to get bloodier.