This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 4, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Obama administration has pledged to make spending on wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

more transparent, but has the public ever really taken a good

look at the true cost of American foreign policy?

Christopher Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, Comics.

President Obama has made it very clear that he wants to take what previously had been hidden within supplementals in the war in

wars in Iraq in Afghanistan and bring them essentially on budget. He's also

a pledge that flag-draped coffins returning from war will not be hidden from the public's view.

Those two sort of dovetail together in terms of the costs of war.

Right, I mean, our policy makers have been engaged for some time in a series of different sleight of hand

tricks to conceal the costs of our foreign policies of which the wars in Iraq and

Afghanistan are just apart. Interestingly, as the casualties shift from the war in Iraq which has always has been for some time

quite unpopular to the war in Afghanistan which remains popular despite the rising

costs there is perhaps less concern that seeing the people coming home who haven't paid the great

the supreme sacrifice that that will not turn public opinion against the war.

By the same token, the notion of folding in the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

into the Pentagon budget and being a bit more transparent about it.

Perhaps that also reflects an expectation that those costs will not drive the public to not

support those wars, again, especially the war in Afghanistan. The public

presumes that by ending combat operations in Iraq that the costs of that war

are going to decline precipitously are going to?

...