Bob Wright is the new P.T. Barnum of some of the most interesting virtual political and policy web-discussions anywhere at Bloggingheads.tv. He invited me to spend about an hour with him yesterday discussing Barack Obama's speech, currents in our evolving foreign policy, and general takes on Iraq, Iran, the Middle East broadly, and China.

Wright, who has been writing up a storm for the New York Times this past month, throws out some fascinating ideas that we both wrestled with on the subject of Israel's nukes and Iran's hunger for them.

Because it was mentioned during the discussion, I'm already being deluged for requests for the April 2003 New York Times article that I wrote after the Iraq invasion suggesting a stakeholder model to build a new class of political and economic winners in Iraq -- who were helped by us. This is the proposal in which I suggested that the Alaska Permanent Fund might be a model for distributing oil wealth to Iraqi citizens much like we helped break up aristocratic estates in Japan then distributing this land to farmers throughout the country.

More soon.

-- Steve Clemons