The Sunni insurgency against his American-backed government rumbles bloodily on, with a rash of suicide bombings killing at least 100 civilians last week alone.
A marked departure from the grueling toll of the last few weeks, the relative lull seems at first glance to contradict predictions that a bloody April was just the start of America's killing season a rash of violence invited by the warmer weather of spring.
Top rash will definitely kill a child without treatment.
"Man abandons rash plan to kill his wife after brief pause" is, as he says, the kind of headline you will never read, though not (as he implies) because newspapers have no taste for "good news" but because public events such as court trials ("Man murders wife") make news, while changes of heart, being private, do not.
As they set about killing the unarmed inhabitants, strobe lighting breaks out like a rash all over their mime: the effect is more disco than disaster.
Last month, the same jury, made up of seven women and five men, deadlocked over whether to impose the death penalty on Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali, 24, who bombed the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, killing 213 people.
He stands suspected of encouraging, or at least allowing, a rash of pogroms that killed thousands of men, women and children, most of them members of the Muslim minority.
A powerful painkiller that can be fatal even in small doses is the latest front in a nationwide epidemic of street drug abuse, recently becoming the prime suspect in a rash of overdoses that killed six people in less than a week in Sacramento County.
A final, disastrous role as the poet Robert Browning, with gummed-on beard that triggered a giant rash all over her face, killed the dream.
Nine Israelis have been killed in a rash of stabbings, shootings and hit-and-run attacks in Jerusalem over the past month.
