Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast

Tuesday, June 12th with Anastasia Iglova.

Despite an overextended troop deployment and dwindling support for our operations in Iraq,

Senator Joe Lieberman made a statement yesterday that called for, I quote,

aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq.

He cited evidence of a base there used to train insurgents to kill American soldiers.

The Cato Institute's Chairman Bill Niskanen speaks out against a strike on Iran in this

podcast.

Is Iran becoming a significant military threat to our interests in the Middle East?

I think that there's threat to us is no different than it was several months ago.

President Bush put another carrier task force in the Middle East,

I think, in large part for bluff in the Middle East, I think in large part for Bluff in the sense that he wanted to assure the Iranians that they could not increase their threat against us.

He has fortunately, he's not had occasion to use that force and he has also backtracked

somewhat on his prior position of not having any direct diplomatic relations with either

Iran or with Syria.

And the Kondi Rice has talked with the Syrians and the American ambassador in Baghdad has

talked with the Iranian ambassador.

So there does seem to be a little bit more opening there to try to avoid the situation in Iran becoming a regional war.

That's going to be particularly a problem for the United States when and if we start withdrawing

to keep that whole area from breaking out into a larger regional war, maybe including Turkey,

because there have been some tensions on the Turkish Iraqi border concerning Kurdish

guerrillas.

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