This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 11th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

With the Iraq Progress reports of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker now in the books,

how has the debate over Iraq changed?

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

not much.

General Petraeus gets most of the attention

in these hearings, but the truth is that most of the hard work and the

essential work is being done by Ambassador Crocker to the extent that he can.

The point is, of course, that Ambassador Crocker does not control what Iraqi politicians

do.

He does not have enormous leverage over Iraq's neighbors to cooperate in some kind of a

regional security framework. He does not have any operational control obviously

over any of the security forces operating

Iraq both Iraqi forces and American forces. So he depends upon greater

security to allow the State Department teams, the provincial

reconstruction teams and other work that's going on inside of Iraq. He needs that

military support to be able to do his work but at the end of the day

the crucial decisions will be made or not made by Iraqi politicians and what we've seen

over the course the last few weeks is the extent to which Iraqi society is still bitterly divided even among the various Shiite factions that

we've seen this problem, this endemic problem inside of Iraq

that the central government does not have a lot of authority. It cannot

dictate events in the provinces and therefore it is it is heavily

...