Welcome to the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 21st. I'm Anastasia Glova.

While still waiting for the new strategy that he will announce next month, President Bush

signaled at a press conference on Wednesday that he may go against the recommendations

of his joint chiefs of staff and increase troop levels in Iraq.

The President also conceded for the first time that current American strategy in Iraq is not

leading to victory.

Director of Foreign Policy Studies, Christopher Preble, offers his remarks.

It looks like Bush has finally admitted that we're not winning in Iraq, but we're not losing either.

That's right. The president has said that the US is not winning in Iraq, but he also

says we're not losing. This is the same position that General Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has come up with, and it is significant that the President

has admitted as much because for some time there was a sense that the U.S. was not winning

in Iraq, that in fact the violence has gone up even though the US troop

levels have stayed the same in Iraqi security forces at least depending on whose numbers you

believe are going up and yet the violence increases and so the problem

for the White House over time has been that they increasingly seem to be divorced

from reality.

The public sees what's happening, we see the statistics and the president has been

saying he's winning. The reason why he's

been saying that for so long is because there is a theory about maintaining public

support for wars, military operations abroad that if the American public

believes that we're winning

then they're more likely to support it. This theory has been under stress as it's fair

...