This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 6, 2017. I'm Kila Brown.

Barack Obama will have the dubious distinction of serving as president during a time of unceasing

war.

First Iraq and Afghanistan, then Pakistan, Libya, Syria, and others.

Ben Friedman is a research fellow at the Cato Institute. We talked about all of

Obama's wars.

In retrospect, I think people tend to overestimate his dovishness at the time.

His stance was at the war in Afghanistan, which of course was also ongoing,

was being neglected by the Bush administration's focus on Iraq. But Obama inherited the Bush administration's plan

to withdraw from Iraq, which was ongoing when he took office

and he continued it.

There's also a lot of criticism of how that process was handled, but the fact remains that he continued the Bush administration's policies there.

Drone strikes at the time were limited, at least relatively speaking, they were limited

taking place mostly in Pakistan and Obama has vastly increased the number of drone strikes and the locations where they're taking place to include Somalia and Yemen at a much greater clip along with Pakistan.

So to the extent that President Obama viewed Iraq as the

bad war and Afghanistan is the worthy the good war, to what extent did he deviate

really from the Bush administration policies when Bush left

office with respect to getting out of Iraq?

The Bush administration's plan was to gradually withdraw from Iraq.

However, they were attempting to negotiate an agreement

to keep some number of troops there.

The Obama administration's plan was the exact same thing. The negotiations failed, the

...