THE IRAQI OIL TRUST IDEA, pushed here for years, is getting another push in today’s Wall Street Journal. It’s a subscriber-only link, but here’s a bit:

Privatizing Iraq’s oil assets, and vesting all citizens with shares, can provide incentive for every Iraqi — including Sunnis, the insurgency’s core — to view commerce as a better path than violence. Ownership would provide 28 million citizens with a prospective increase in per-capita income of about $5,800, substantially raising their present income. This is unlikely to persuade hard-core terrorists to change course. But turning all Iraqis into stockholders of the nation’s oil wealth can win over the support of the bulk of the Sunni population that now backs the insurgency through provision of foot soldiers, intelligence, cover, safe houses or passive acceptance. . . .

At present, oil assets are a government monopoly. Privatizing them and giving every Iraqi an equal share in ownership can be accomplished by turning over the assets to private companies — two in the south and one each in north and central Iraq — and vesting all citizens with equal shareholdings in each company, e.g., 5 or 10 shares issued to each Iraqi in each company. Shares could be traded at market-determined prices, but trading would be limited to Iraqis, at least for an initial period of 5-10 years, after which the market might open to foreign participation.

I think that this idea is worth exploring, though sadly politicians won’t want to give up this much power. After all, we could do the same thing with federal lands in the United States.

JOHN KERRY ON IRAQ: “The only exit strategy is victory.” Absolutely right!

SOME POSITIVE NEWS from Europe:

Angela Merkel made her first foreign trip as German chancellor Wednesday, calling the NATO alliance the main forum for settling world problems and saying her country must heal its rift with the United States.

Before traveling to Brussels, Germany’s first female leader stopped in Paris, where she reiterated her country’s close ties with France and signaled that foreign relations will be a priority of the coalition government she heads.

Merkel showed few signs of any shift in the foreign policies pursued by her predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, but she said the time has come for improving relations with the Bush administration that were bruised by Schroeder’s strong opposition to the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Good idea.

JACK BALKIN has more on the Padilla case. (Via Volokh.com).

HUGO CHAVEZ: Exporting revolution?

WORRIES ABOUT SEXUAL TEMPTATION at Egyptian polling places. Well, I did once write an article entitled “Is Democracy Like Sex?”

JOHN TAMMES is giving thanks. Prof. Robert Jensen is not.

UPDATE: Jonathan Gewirtz finds Jensen’s religious view of politics unimpressive.

IN THE MAIL: Joel Greenblatt’s The Little Book That Beats the Market. That’s more than my portfolio has done!

MAX BOOT:

WHEN IT COMES to the future of Iraq, there is a deep disconnect between those who have firsthand knowledge of the situation — Iraqis and U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq — and those whose impressions are shaped by doomsday press coverage and the imperatives of domestic politics.

A large majority of the American public is convinced that the liberation of Iraq was a mistake, while a smaller but growing number thinks that we are losing and that we need to pull out soon. Those sentiments are echoed by finger-in-the-wind politicians, including many — such as John Kerry, Harry Reid, John Edwards, John Murtha and Bill Clinton — who supported the invasion.

American soldiers are also much more optimistic than American civilians. The Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations just released a survey of American elites that found that 64% of military officers are confident that we will succeed in establishing a stable democracy in Iraq. The comparable figures for journalists and academics are 33% and 27%, respectively. Even more impressive than the Pew poll is the evidence of how our service members are voting with their feet. Although both the Army and the Marine Corps are having trouble attracting fresh recruits — no surprise, given the state of public opinion regarding Iraq — reenlistment rates continue to exceed expectations. Veterans are expressing their confidence in the war effort by signing up to continue fighting.

Yes, I’ve noticed this pattern myself.

BOMBING AL JAZEERA: The real answer, of course, is that since Al Jazeera is a CIA front operation we’d never bomb it. Duh.

HEH.

ERIC MULLER, who says “I suck at coming up with book titles,” is having a contest to name his next book.

TOM MAGUIRE has lots of interesting stuff, mostly of the Plame / Woodward variety. Just keep scrolling.

BRANNON DENNING AND I have a law review article on what the Raich decision is likely to mean for the future of federalism. Entitled What Hath Raich Wrought? Five Takes, it’s part of a symposium featuring such blogospheric legal luminaries as Randy Barnett, Jonathan Adler, Ann Althouse, and more. (But while they may be luminaries, our article is the only one, I believe, to invoke Emily Litella — and it also has zombies, and a subtle Simpsons reference. Plus a radical theory of the Necessary and Proper clause!) You can read our article here, and see the symposium issue with links to all the articles here.

JEFF GOLDSTEIN debates torture with Cathy Young et al.

UPDATE: Stephen Green weighs in, with a comparison to the debate over assisted suicide.

GATEWAY PUNDIT looks at the new GOP TV ad blitz.

AVIAN FLU UPDATE:

Federal health officials are seeking to update quarantine regulations, hoping changes such as easier access to airline passenger lists could better protect Americans from foreign infectious diseases, including bird flu.

The proposed changes, announced Tuesday by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, include easier CDC access to airline and ship passenger lists, a clearer appeals process for people subjected to quarantines, and explicit authority to offer vaccinations and medical treatment to quarantined people.

The changes are part of a multi-pronged attempt to guard against infectious agents from abroad. In the past 1 1/2 years, the CDC also has increased the number of quarantine stations at airports, ship ports and land-border crossings from eight to 18.

Whether or not avian flu turns out to be a threat to humans, we need to have this kind of thing squared away before we need it.

Meanwhile, mixed news from China:

China called bird flu a “serious epidemic” and pledged to step up measures to fight the deadly virus Tuesday as officials announced three new outbreaks of the disease in the country’s poultry. . . .

China has reported one human fatality from the disease and one suspected death. The country is vaccinating billions of poultry.

Let’s hope all this works.

UPDATE: Some thoughts from a U.S. expat in China, including this worry: “My fear…is if there is a pandemic outbreak and I decide to get the family out of Dodge and send them home, the US government won’t allow them access, despite being citizens. The talk of quarantines and closing access is a bit worrying. I’d hate to be stuck here with limited access to medical help and medicines.”

THE COUNTERTERRORISM BLOG has more on the Padilla indictment.

NO, I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY about the Kara Borden case. I leave that stuff to others.

NOW HE TELLS US:

A decade after Ruben Cantu was executed for capital murder, the only witness to the crime is recanting and his co-defendant says Cantu, then 17, was not even with him that night. . . .

Sam D. Millsap Jr., the district attorney who handled the case, said he never should have sought the death penalty in a case based on testimony from a witness who identified a suspect only after police showed him a photo three times.

I think he’s right, but I wish this had occurred to him a bit sooner. I don’t think the death penalty is inherently immoral, but I think that Charles Black’s argument about the inevitability of caprice and mistake is awfully powerful.

UPDATE: GWU Law Professor Bob Cottrol emails: “Remember our op-ed piece in the Washington Times ‘Greasing the Skids at the Start of Death Row’ a few years back? We were more correct than we knew. . . . Basically the system is broken. Instead of insisting on the highest possible standards in capital cases we treat them as all too routine. The post conviction review process is more concerned with trivial technicalities than determining whether all doubt has been extinquished in capital cases.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Clayton Cramer notes the absence of an undo option.

MORE: Here’s more at PrawfsBlawg.

JOSE PADILLA has been indicted. You can see a copy of the indictment here. The Volokh Conspiracy has more.

GRAND ROUNDS is up!

JEFF CORNWALL says the people are missing the story on the economy.

IN THE MAIL: Anya Kamenetz’s Generation Debt, sounding a theme I’ve heard before (“An emerging spokesperson for a new generation passionately and persuasively addresses the grim state of young people today-and tells us how we can, and must, save our future.”) It all sounds so early-1990s, but I suspect that we’ll hear it a lot in the coming election cycle. And as the whole PorkBusters thing illustrates, there’s a there, there.

Also Frank Warren’s rather cool PostSecret : Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives — based on the website of the same name, of course.

THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD NEWS:

Despite turbulence from hurricanes and high energy prices, the economy is expected to log respectable growth this year and next, business economists say.

The economy, as measured by gross domestic product, is projected to grow by 3.6 percent for all of 2005 and 3.3 percent in 2006, according to the National Association for Business Economics.

That’s quite good, really.