Another year, another Halloween, a holiday that's increasingly being taken over by the adults and the marketers. But beyond the parties, silly costumes, and overpriced bites of candy, Halloween has its roots as a pagan holiday, one that is celebrated by indigenous cultures in a variety of ways to mark the fall harvest, the midpoint between fall equinox and winter solstice, the onset of the year's darkest days. In pagan circles it is considered the day when the veil between the living and dead is at its thinnest.

And the following day, Nov. 1, is celebrated in Mexico as the Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.

On this day, Mexicans celebrate--often by creating commemorative altars--the lives and living spirits of all those who've passed on in the previous year. It's a holiday for our times. If you don't believe it, check out the Washington Post's web gallery of photos of American soldiers killed this year in Iraq, at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/iraq/casualties/facesofthefallen.htm.

The faces stare out at you, full of youth and promise and hope and life: portraits, probably obtained from the families rather than the Pentagon (which would rather not dwell on how well our occupation isn't going). They show young adults in dress uniform, or in high school graduation gear. One is of a young couple hiking. Taken collectively, they're painful to look at.

As the dates get more recent, more and more of the listed names have no photos next to them, the portraits having not yet been obtained. The page is only updated weekly, and it's getting hard to keep up. On Dia de los Muertos itself, at least 15 more U.S. soldiers suffered what Donald Rumsfeld promptly, cruelly called their "necessary" deaths.

Tell the families that those deaths were "necessary." Tell the Iraqis that didn't want them there in the first place, and that warned of the danger that would result. Tell their fellow soldiers, lying in bed at night, listening to the endless rounds of errant homemade mortars attacking the U.S. bases.

Dia de los Muertos memorializes everybody--the one in 75 or so human lives that left our world in the past 365 days. As usual this year, the list includes various celebrities and notables: Edward Said, Johnny Cash, John Ritter, Bob Hope.

But far more of us simply lose people notable in our own lives, or who were notable in their own circles, but not widely known among the public. And this year, seemingly more than ever, the holiday belonged to the portraits that are missing. The ones not yet in place, the ones still to come, and the ones we don't even know about.

In this latter category, it's hard not to notice that while American media scrambles to memorialize dead U.S. soldiers (and ex-CIA mercenaries), few are trying to count the much larger number of Iraqi deaths. A handful of web sites are attempting to provide estimated ranges of Iraqi civilian deaths resulting from the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, but it's an imprecise count at best. The best-known of these sites, iraqbodycount.org, has documented somewhere between 7800 and 9600 reported Iraqi deaths, but their efforts are hampered by the complete absence of information from America's occupying army and "provisional" government. Washington simply doesn't tally the Iraqis it kills, resistance fighter or innocent bystander. Reporters in the field have frequently noted instances of U.S. soldiers firing on crowds or civilians that weren't even reported to local commanders, let alone the brass back home. It's a grim new version of don't ask, don't tell.

Dia de los Muertos is a useful holiday, one intended to help us grieve, memorialize, and move on, an acknowledgement that dying is an inevitable part of living. It's a holiday based (for a change) far more in peoples' emotional needs than in Hallmark's marketing strategies.

But this year, the missing portraits hovered over the day like a black cloud. Young soldiers, poorly trained for sentry and police duty, hated by most of the people they see, and afraid for their lives, seem now to have carte blanche in Iraq to open fire on the smallest pretext without fear of consequence. The stories continue to mount of ordinary Iraqis ambushed by hidden checkpoints, or shot to death for not obeying an order they didn't hear in a language they didn't understand. Anonymous deaths, noted in their home villages, unknown to us halfway around the world. Meanwhile, we have the likes of Rumsfeld, calling the resulting U.S. deaths "necessary" while not calling the far larger number of Iraqi deaths anything at all; President Peter Pan insisting all is wonderful; and all Pete's apologists and sycophants blasting the media for not reporting more "good news" from Iraq.

It's a recipe for many more dead in Iraq in the next days, weeks, months, year. There is no doubt as to who the political leader is that set these events in motion, and who continues to issue the killing orders. There is no question as to where the responsibility rests for the loss of all those faces once full of hope, and the larger number of extinguished Iraqi faces we'll never see, in death as in life.

For once, oddly, a day meant to memorialize instead has become a call to action: to demand that Iraq's imperial rulers in Washington stop inflicting so many needless, anonymous, and utterly unnecessary deaths. Unless Bush and his cabal reverse their policies, and quickly, there will be many more dead to memorialize this time next year.