This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 2, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The death of Osama bin Laden with a precise attack by U.S. forces

may be caused for celebration, but Al Qaeda has been largely irrelevant in years

since September 11, 2001.

David Ritker's legal policy analyst at the Cato Institute and former Special Forces

Officer serving in Afghanistan

offers his thoughts on the death of an al-Qaeda leader.

Well I would take away three lessons from the successful strike that killed bin Laden. First I'd say that bin Laden's death highlights the failure of

al Qaeda to achieve the impossible goal of establishing global caliphate

living under bin Laden's holistic worldview.

As soon as al-Qaeda establishes a return address for American special operations personnel

to raid or to hit with a bomb, they'll be pummeled into irrelevance, frankly.

Second, I'd say that this strike is the strongest indication, yet that prolonged occupation

with line troops is not what is going to prove to be the crux of reducing

al-Qaeda's influence to irrelevance and it will be more an intelligence war that

will make the difference in the long run with the combination of both intelligence and

special operations personnel. And I think that the third the combination of

of patreous to have the

of Petraeus to have the CIA is actually a signal that this is in a way

that this event is not news that the news that Petraeus was going to the CIA or

nominated for the CIA is a is a sign of the synergy that we've tried to

...