One more thing for Obama's to-do list.

It would seem that while I was drinking bubbly and counting down the seconds to 2009, the illegality of the war in Iraq took on an additional dimension. I'm nearly two weeks late to comment on this, but it's disturbing enough to be worth a mention.

On January 1, according to an article by Bruce Ackerman and Oona Hathaway, Congress' authorization for the war in Iraq expired. Bush had not sought to renew it. An agreement has been presented to the Iraqi Parliament by Prime Minister al-Maliki, and it was authorized there. However, on the US side of things, it seems that members of Congress had to rely on the Arab media's reporting of the agreement to catch a glimpse of its terms.

Yet another thing Obama is going to have to deal with when he moves into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Because, as stated in the article:

We are living in an age of small wars—some are blunders, but some will be necessary. The challenge is to sustain their democratic legitimacy by keeping them under congressional control. If Obama goes along with the Bush agreement, he will make this impossible. Future presidents will cite the Iraqi accord as a precedent whenever they choose to convert Congress' authorization of a limited war into an open-ended conflict.

And this is the president whose reign I came of age in.