This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 17, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President is mulling military action in Iraq as violence there escalates.

Ben Friedman, a research fellow in defense and homeland security studies at the Cato

Institute, argues it's not clear how U.S. security is enhanced by re-engaging in Iraq.

What the president said on Friday was that he'd take a few days,

only he said exactly how long to decide what sort of force to use in Iraq or whether or not to use force to help the

government stand up to the Sunni militiamen led by this ISIS group and we sent a aircraft carrier and a couple other Navy ships to the

region so we'll be ready to use air power if we decide to do that the

president did rule out using ground troops.

So apparently we're deciding if we're going to give them drone support for intelligence to target

and also to do the attacks or maybe an air strike on behalf the Iraqi government against these

Sunni militiamen, including the ISIS group.

Does this set in stone this what seems to be an Obama tactic which is to help people from the

air so to speak that is not not put troops on the ground but also just drop a

bunch of bombs that sort of thing?

I think it does put that in place. I think this president in some ways behaves that way

using air power limited amounts of force to accomplish objectives because of the political circumstances

he's in or that he's helped create, which is that he's present at a time when the US

public is overwhelmingly opposed to military

adventures involving large amounts of ground forces as an obvious result of the

wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but at the same time because of his own beliefs I guess and

...