Maybe things aren't quite as bad as I think

An AP article on Sunday brought a little comfort to this darkening corner of the universe.

The chilling sights and sounds of war fill newspapers and television screens worldwide, but war itself is in decline, peace researchers report.

In fact, the number killed in battle has fallen to its lowest point in the post-World War II period, dipping below 20,000 a year by one measure. ...

For months the battle reports and casualty tolls from Iraq and Afghanistan have put war in the headlines, but Swedish and Canadian non-governmental groups tracking armed conflict globally find a general decline in numbers from peaks in the 1990s.

The authoritative Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in a 2004 Yearbook report obtained by The Associated Press in advance of publication, says 19 major armed conflicts were under way worldwide in 2003, a sharp drop from 33 wars counted in 1991.

The Canadian organization Project Ploughshares, using broader criteria to define armed conflict, says in its new annual report that the number of conflicts declined to 36 in 2003, from a peak of 44 in 1995. ...

"Not only are the numbers declining, but the intensity" - the bloodshed in each conflict - "is declining," said [American scholar Monty G.] Marshall, founder of a University of Maryland program studying political violence.

The researchers credited both changing political situations in the world and the growth of international peacekeeping missions, which have tripled since 1999.

Footnote: One sobering note is that Andrew Mack, director of Project Ploughshares, said the figures don't include deaths from war-induced starvation and disease, deaths from ethnic conflicts not involving states, or unopposed massacres, such as in Rwanda in 1994.