Ban Ki-Moon Close To Rocket Attack - Very, Very Close

I sure hope he wasn't talking about how safe Iraq was, this being Ban Ki-Moon, however, he wasn't:



And now the context:

BAGHDAD (AP) - A rocket landed near the prime minister's office Thursday during the first visit to Iraq by the head of the United Nations in nearly a year and a half, sending Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ducking unharmed behind a podium at a news conference.

The attack came as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government said it had been negotiating with Sunni insurgents for months, and the U.S. military said that it had released a senior aide to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr on al-Maliki's request.

The rocket caused no injuries but rattled the building in the heavily guarded Green Zone, sent small chips of debris floating from the ceiling, and left a three-foot-wide crater about 50 yards away outside.

Oh, my first comment was somewhat on the mark:

It struck right after al-Maliki, standing next to Ban, had finished telling reporters that Ban's visit was a sign that Iraq was on the road to stability.

Now the right-wing blogosphere is going nuts with death wishes for Ki-Moon:

Yet more proof that prayer does not work.

No heart, no guts, no spine, no balls, no brains: there's no way on can kill people like him.

Can we get him near the blast this time, for fuck's sake?

Oh sorry. I'm mistaken. Those are the comments over at MetaFilter about when there was a failed attack on our VP over in Iraq a few weeks ago.

I'd bloviate on the point, but if you read Ultramontane's previous post, that pretty much covers it.

Needless to say (and yet I'm saying it) I'm glad Ban Ki-Moon is all right and deplore the terrorists (or "militants" as he would say) who tried to kill him/others