This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 31st, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Three US service members killed by a drone attack in Jordan.

That's now spurred many hawks in Congress to call for swift

military action against Iran. Justin Logan directs defense and foreign policy

studies at the Cato Institute, he says that the base that was attacked serves basically no other purpose than to be a target,

thus allowing those same hawks to call for war with Iran.

It seems that there are some members of Congress who are always ready to initiate

hostilities against certain foreign countries. In this case, it is Iran.

And for people who follow this pretty closely,

it's pretty easy to pick out who those members of the Senate

are.

But evaluate this. members of the Senate are, but evaluate these events and the calls to immediately

respond with overwhelming force.

Sure. So briefly overnight between Saturday and Sunday, a base called Tower 22, which is at the borderlands between Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, but on the Jordanian side of the border came under drone fire from one of the many

Iran-backed militias in the region. There have been more than 150 such attacks since the 10-7 Hamas

terrorist attack on Israel. No US troops had been killed until this attack, but unfortunately this attack took the lives of three U.S. service members who were stationed in Jordan

In injured dozens more about eight of which were severe enough to be evacuated to

Europe for serious medical treatment.

The administration has advanced a completely insultingly stupid rationale for the U.S. deployment in Syria, which the Tower 22 base supports.

Their official rationale is that those troops are part of the counter ISIS mission. The problem with that rationale is that the

counter ISIS mission is not doing anything these days. ISIS, the caliphate, was

...