Oil Platform

While free-market types debate just how to privatize Iraq's oil industry, officials there favor a different approach, according to The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. advisers and Iraqi oil officials, now studying how to organize Iraq's vast but dilapidated oil industry, are leaning heavily toward recommending the formation of a large state-run petroleum company….Modeled on Saudi Arabia's Saudi Aramco or Kuwait's Kuwait Petroleum Co., an Iraqi national oil company would be run by a professional management team insulated from political interference in day-to-day affairs, but ultimately overseen by a politically appointed oil minister.

[Via Liberty & Power.]