The world is getting more peaceful

You would not know it from most shoddy "20 second sound bite" news services but this Washington Post article clearly states otherwise. I quote:
A major study by the Rand Corp. published this year found that U.N. peace-building operations had a two-thirds success rate. They were also surprisingly cost-effective. In fact, the United Nations spends less running 17 peace operations around the world for an entire year than the United States spends in Iraq in a single month.
The reality is that, since the end of the Cold War, armed conflict and nearly all other forms of political violence have decreased. The world is far more peaceful than it was.
It turns out that terrorism kills very few people, even small wars kill many people, and as the world becomes more tightly linked economically, war makes even less sense to sane and rational people.

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