This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 25, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama's incursion over Libya has left many people asking what the President

aims to achieve.

Ben Friedman, Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies at the Cato Institute

argues that the President's rudderless attacks are simply war without policy.

President Obama said that US policy in Libya has a different goal than the war the United States is helping execute in Libya, this air war.

The President said US policy is to help the rebels overthrow Gaddafi and set up a democratic government.

That's what we'd like to see happen, he said.

But the war, the purpose of the war, as outlined by UN Security Council Resolution 1973 is just to protect civilians from Qadhafi.

And so what we're doing with air power is simply preventing Qadhafi's military forces both in the air and on the ground from attacking civilians.

And that dichotomy between what the United States says it's doing as a policy matter and what

the war is doing is pretty hard to

figure out and I think it causes us some trouble. It seems to me that the reason

we're there, the basic reason is that we want to help the rebels achieve their

revolution. That's the thing that motivated most people to care about this.

The humanitarian imperative, I think, frankly, was secondary to that because there's lots of places in the world

where far larger humanitarian disasters occur that don't interest us. So I think what interested us here was the opportunity to

institute some sort of liberal government, whatever its chances for success. But

we're now in a situation where we're bombing Gaddafi's forces on the ground only insofar as they attack towns.

And we're not attacking the forces when they're moving around separately from the battles they're engaging in in towns mostly in eastern Libya.

So it seems to me that the effect of the policy, the effect of the military policy is to

stalemate the war because we're only stopping Gaddafi's forces from achieving their

...