Washington Post editorial page highlights some interesting new research:

An economic geographer at Johns Hopkins University, [Roger] Stern contends that the Iranian oil industry is actually in something of a death spiral. Iran has been missing its OPEC quota of late, and while high oil prices have masked the decline by keeping revenue up, production has been declining. Higher domestic energy demand in Iran combined with difficulty in attracting foreign investment and other economic problems, he argues, make a rapid decline in oil exports likely — ending in the “extinction” of Iranian oil exports in 2014-15.

The Post offers up the bloggish observation that “We don’t know whether Mr. Stern is right.” I don’t know whether or not he’s right, either, and I can’t find the paper where Stern makes that argument. In this article, however, Stern winds up being quoted as having policy prescriptions I agree with.

The saddest thing about the 3,000th American death in Iraq is that unlike the first batch of casualties, people getting killed or maimed in Iraq these days are really doing so in the course of a bad faith military option. Iraq Year One was a fiasco, but it was a genuine mistake. Since then, and certainly these days, we’re passed all that. Nobody genuinely believes that they (or anyone else) has an Iraq policy that offers any kind of reasonable prospects for success. So young men and women are out there killing and dying not because the people giving them their orders really think those orders are a good idea. Instead, they need to stay in Iraq, need to keep killing and keep dying, because the idea of admitting failure is too much for some people.