Toll, Maliki : Terrorism is "so over"

It was weird to come back to work after the holiday weekend, thinking for days in a row that the whole world was not in fact on fire, only to discover that reports of peace breaking out in Iraq were greatly exaggerated...

My dear print edition of the Inquirer showed me two headlines, face-to-face, declaring the banality of events in Iraq: Maliki Declares Terrorism Over, and UAE Forgives Iraq Debt. Now, I already understand that Nouri al-Maliki is prone to speak in metaphor, or to ingnore nuances of tense. Maybe he meant, "Terrorism is so over," as in "passe"? So I ignored the piece. Looking to my left, I found the Emir of Dubai, a man who finds so few things in the world worth spending his money on he built islands instead, magnanimously forgiving Saddam Hussein's tiny debt. Did 'em a solid. Security not an issue, money comin' in. So I ignored that story too, failing utterly to catch the little bleeding blurb tacked on at the end:

A Kurdish party member was injured yesterday in an assassination attempt by a roadside bomb that killed seven people and wounded three others in Iraq's eastern Diyala province. [...]Also yesterday, a car bomb in the northern Shiite Baghdad district of Shaab killed six people and injured 14, including three police officers, according to police and medical officials.

Right. I'll accept the shame of not reading the whole news. My bad.

But the same death toll in Islamabad got play in the Inqy as the beginning of armageddon, using "blast" four times and hyping connections to last year's dispute over the Red Mosque. With no group claiming responsibility, the piece inserts a sheepish: "It was not clear if the events were linked, and a mosque official condemned the attack."

Again, I can hardly blame Chairman Toll for diminishing the footprint of Iraqi violence while exaggerating that of violence in Pakistan. These are AP stories. All he's doing is pulling shit in off the wire. No one is fabricating the news. No, that would take effort.

Sloth, not avarice, is the motivator. The news source for the fifth-largest city in the US can't send people overseas to actually get their own version of events. The editors of the Inquirer are too lazy even to concoct an individuated appraisal of what they pull off the wires. If, officially, Iraq Is Pacified And Our Next War Is In Pakistan, who is Bruce Toll to say no? Confronting conventional wisdom isn't part of the Inquirer brand. Leave that to the Washington Post:

BAGHDAD, July 6 -- A wave of attacks in Baghdad and areas north of the capital Sunday shattered a relative lull in violence, killing 16 people and injuring 15 a day after Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared that Iraq's government had defeated terrorism.