This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, February 13, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Has the United States forgotten how to combat insurgency?

What would victory in Iraq even mean if U.S. troops must stay there no matter what?

And what have we learned from Iraq?

Christopher Preble is Director of Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute and co-author of the new policy

analysis learning the right lessons from Iraq.

It was released today.

Al Qaeda is in extraordinary crisis if you believe news reports.

This from the Times Online, last year's mass defection of ordinary Sunnis,

from Al Qaeda to the U.S. military created panic, fear, and the unwillingness to fight, the terrorist group's security structure suffered total collapse.

That is from one of Al Qaeda's top leaders in Anbar province in October.

Right. I think Al Qaeda in Iraq always had a tough cell, a tough mission.

First of all, they were outsiders in Iraq, not all that different from the Americans

in Iraq, and in fact, over a period of time, Al Qaeda overreached considerably their violence turned off many of the people

that they might have expected to be their natural allies, the Sunnis, particularly in the

Western provinces in An bar and elsewhere.

And in addition, increasingly the Sunni leaders,

the tribal leaders in that region realized that AlQaeda was not really did not really share their

long-term goals. True al-Qaeda was also opposed to the United States but that only

got you so far and so we saw even before the surge was ramped up, we saw some tribes in Anbar

and elsewhere turning against al-Qaeda and that process accelerated as the United

...