Morning brief, Thursday, May 4

Peggy Noonan thinks they should have killed him:

Excuse me, I'm sorry, and I beg your pardon, but the jury's decision on Moussaoui gives me a very bad feeling. What we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve. 

Iran 

Britain, France, and Germany have turned in their homework to the Security Council. Russia and China oppose it. The LAT looks at the complicated Russia-Iran relationship up close. 

Iraq

Parliament convened. David Broder gently endorses the Biden/Gelb plan: 

This is, he told me, not a call for partition. It is a recognition of what he considers a reality -- that the component parts of Iraqi society need "breathing space" to adjust their relations, rather than continue down the present road, where militias loyal to one side or the other are engaged in wanton killing and ethnic cleansing.

Trade 

A former trade negotiator writes in the FT: "What should be clear by now is that this conventional approach to negotiating a trade round will not – indeed, cannot – produce the pro-development result that is the ostensible goal of these negotiations."

Gary Hufbauer tells us here at Foreign Policy: "[T]his could mark the end of the WTO’s 50-year run as the engine of trade liberalization. The WTO will not cease to exist, but as the leading forum for trade liberalization, it may very well cease to function."

Elsewhere

Banks in the Palestinian territories aren't accepting transfers from abroad. 

"What plagues Sudan is fundamentally a regime at the center which is highly discriminatory," says John Prendergast. "Until you deal with that, we are going to see a continuation of this cycle of sort of half baked agreements with the most heavily armed elements of different regions in Sudan, which will never bring peace to the country."

Peter Beinart on the issue of terrorism and the border with Mexico: "Rarely have the two parties been so united in a belief that is so wrong." A controversial new Chinese bishop. A story on nationbuilding in Afghanistan. Nepal to Maoists: Fine, we'll stop calling you terrorists. Bob Kagan and Amartya Sen are debating at Slate.