It seems that the official Iranian news agency doctored the photo of yesterday’s missile launch to add an additional missile.

Maybe Steve Hadley should put the above image in the briefing book before the next G-8 summit:

“Amigo! Amigo!” Mr. Bush called out cheerily in Spanish when he spotted the Italian prime minister. “How you doing, Silvio? Good to see you!”

Or perhaps it’s elitist to suggest that you should address people in the correct language.

Iraqi officials continue to endorse Barack Obama’s plans for Iraq:

Iraqi spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said in Baghdad on Wednesday that a U.S. pullout could be completed in several years. “It can be 2011 or 2012,” he said. “We don’t have a specific date in mind, but we need to agree on the principle of setting a deadline.”

This, I should say, is why even though Obama’s determination to maintain some wiggle room throughout the primaries gave me some concern, it’s also not a crazy idea. If the Iraqi government has some strong desire for the last American troops to leave in January 2011 instead of May 2010 I think it’s common sense to at least consider accommodating that. Meanwhile, the hawk line here seems to be that the Iraqi government doesn’t really want a timeline for American departure, they’re just pretending to want one because public opinion is so hostile to our presence that they need to demand one.

That set of facts may be true, but the implicit interpretation of them is crazy. If public opinion to our presence is so hostile that Iraqi political leaders feel compelled to set a timeline for the departure of the US military then we should set a timeline as there’s no sense trying to wage counterinsurgency under those conditions.

Excellent points from Kevin Drum and Timothy Noah who observe that you can’t understand the erosion of congressional authority over warmaking without recognizing that members of congress fundamentally don’t want to take responsibility for these kinds of decisions. I would extend the analysis and observe that much the same can be said of the judicial system’s large role in making policy over certain kinds of “hot button” social issues — members of congress like to whine about this when decisions go in unpopular directions, but they don’t want to do anything about it because it’s convenient for them to avoid dealing with it.

In the ideal world of a member of congress he would have tons of authority over issues that allow him to funnel money or other favors to powerful in-district groups, but get to dodge making decisions about everything else under the sun.

Here’s something from the “issue I should have been following” file — it seems there’s a measure working its way through the congress, House Concurrent Resolution 362, that, though non-binding, could be construed as expressing the sense of the congress that the president ought to use military force against Iran. Specifically, force to impose a blockade on Iran — an act of war. The folks pushing the resolution deny that this is their intent, but they also seem disinclined to modify the language. Now Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) who was originally one of the cosponsors of the bill has a HuffPo item urging that the resolution by altered or rejected.

This all comes to me via Justin Logan who sensibly asks why Wexler was cosponsoring it in the first place (answer: because the decision to sign on to non-binding resolutions is often made thoughtlessly and at a relatively low level of a legislative operation), which is of course a good point, but still it’s good work on Wexler’s part to turn around here and draw some attention to the problem.

Roger Cohen lobbies hard for the inclusion of Richard Holbrooke in a very powerful role in an Obama administration. I would say the fact that this seems relatively unlikely to happen was emblematic of the reasons to prefer Obama over Hillary Clinton. I think nobody doubts that Holbrooke is an very able practitioner of a certain brand of diplomacy, but his judgment and substantive ideas about broad policy questions leaves much to be desired.

He’s the leading light of the clan of self-proclaimed “national security Democrats”, that faction of the party sufficiently “serious” about foreign affairs to have seen the deep wisdom of a costly and destructive invasion of Iraq. Holbrooke’s big critique of the war is that “It was a mistake to seek the second — and unnecessary — Security Council resolution. I wrote an op-ed about this six weeks before the disaster in The Washington Post, and predicted that we were heading into a diplomatic train wreck, so this is not simply hindsight.”