Good morning and welcome to February's first episode of Cato Daily Podcast.

I'm Anastasia Yuglova.

In an op-ed that ran in the Sacramento B register on January 28th, Cato's Vice President

for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, Ted Carpenter, who also co-authored

the book Exiting Iraq, Why the U.S. must end the military occupation and renew the war

against Al-Qaeda, argued that the notion that pulling out troops

from Iraq would leave the country a safe haven for Al Qaeda is absurd on its face.

Ted is our guest for the podcast today.

You're disinclined to view an Al Qaeda. Ted is our guest for the podcast today.

You're disinclined to view an al-Qaeda takeover of Iraq as a logical consequence of a U.S.

pullout.

Why?

Iraq is not Afghanistan under the Taliban.

And that occasion, Al Qaeda, had a very large presence in the country,

some 18,000 troops.

It also had the protection of an entrenched friendly government. In Iraq,

Al Qaeda has at most 2,000 troops. the Iraq study group estimates that the total is only about 1,300, and the

government in Iraq is dominated by Shia and Kurds, both of whom absolutely loathe Al Qaeda.

So it's not going to get the protection of the national government, the way it had in Afghanistan.

And what is your assessment of the strength of that Shia-Kurd coalition government?

Well, certainly the government in Baghdad is strong enough that it controls major parts of the country,

and I think equally important, Al Qaeda has lost a lot of the support that it had of the Sunni minority in Iraq.

...