This is a Cato special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. With his latest escalation

President Obama has more than doubled the number of US troops in Afghanistan

since his term began. Traditional conservatism rejects this kind of

escalation absent clear goals and triggers for departure. Former Florida Congressman Joe

Scarborough, host of MS NBC's Morning Joe, spoke today at the Cato

Institute's Conference, Escalate or withdrawal. Conservatives in the war in Afghanistan.

The full event is at Cato.org.

What I found the most difficult issue to explain to conservatives,

who have really seen the definition of conservatism and a conservative foreign policy

distorted over the past decade was the need for Republicans to show restraint abroad.

And that's really what this is about. We can we certainly can talk about Afghanistan and we will. But we need to show restraint abroad.

And we need to do it first of all to our own, to conservatives,

but also we need to have leaders that are willing to go out and forcefully make this argument

to the American people because right now it's not only hard for conservative leaders to

grasp the importance of restraint abroad, it's difficult for Americans to grasp.

There's a new NBC News Wall Street Journal poll that came out two days ago.

Barack Obama is upside down in his approval ratings when it comes to the economy, when it comes to

health care, when it comes to just about every single issue, deficits, debt, but when it comes to his handling of Afghanistan, he's plus 18 percentage points.

His handling of Iraq, he's plus 15 percentage points. When he comes to his handling, well not actually his handling of

Iran, but whether we should invade Iran. Actually, plus 14, Americans believe that if we think that Iran is moving towards having nuclear

weapons, we should invade the third Muslim country in a decade. So with this backdrop I would rec, I would

suggest that one of the reasons why those numbers are as skewed as much as they are is in 2010 there's not much

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