From Dexter Filkins in the NYT:
With soldiers and the police swarming the streets, the country was relatively quiet for most of the day. A suicide bomber killed eight people, including a child, in an attack on a police building in the town of Khanaqin, near the Iranian border. A gun battle broke out between Iraqi troops and insurgents on Haifa Street, one of the most dangerous thoroughfares in central Baghdad. Insurgents attacked at least seven spolling places, from Dohuk in the north to Basra in the south.
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That's about a standard level of attacks, which ain't the same thing as 'relatively quiet.'
P.S. This reminds me of the normalization of violence--and the struggle of what qualifies as news. If something horrible were to happen once a year, say a suicide bomb in Iraq, it'd be big news. But a half-dozen daily? Background noise. And Filkin's reference above is worse than that--it's redefining not just what is "normal" but what is "quiet."
