This beautiful pic was sent in from a reader of The Washington Note in Zanzibar.

Katherine Tiedemann is a Program Associate with the New America Foundation’s Nuclear Strategy & Nonproliferation Initiative.

(Obama Does Brown but Not Brussels) I’m strongly supportive of Barack Obama’s announced plans to spend some quality plane time with Senators Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Jack Reed (D-RI) on a trip to Iraq.

It comes as little surprise that Fred Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, and Jack Keane offer a glowing assessment of the political and security progress in Iraq in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal op-ed “The New Reality in Iraq.

A number of TWN readers and I recently received an email note from the British Embassy in Washington notifying us that an “embassy blog” was being conceived and wanted to ask us our thoughts on the enterprise. I wrote back right away saying cheers, tally-ho, and all that, great idea, a big bold move forward….

I like the folks at US News & World Report but they just sent me a disconcerting political news swipe at sponsored Congressional travel and the Aspen Institute.

In this insightful video op-ed Daniel Levy, the director of New America’s Middle East Initiative, provides a glimpse into the reasons why today’s prisoner exchange was important for both Israel and Lebanon. As Daniel argues, this exchange can be hard to understand in the West.

My discussion today with New Yorker correspondent Jane Mayer on her new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, is one hour and eight minutes long and will air at 2:52 am EST this morning (Wednesday) on C-Span 2.

Washington Post national security columnist David Ignatius in an article a few years ago branded Cheney chief of staff and legal consiglieri David Addington as “Cheney’s Cheney.

The week shouldn’t go by without some acknowledgement of International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo’s decision to seek an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Bashir, who stands accused of crimes against humanity and genocide, is the first Head of State to be charged by the ICC.