This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 23rd, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It seems like it's never a good time to debate one's own gross errors of judgment.

In the case of the Iraq war, however,

understanding the errors of those who took us to war

will help the United States choose its wars more judiciously.

Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute's comments.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, a big Iraq war booster and supporter and planner has been very critical of both Rand Paul of Kentucky and President Obama on this Iraq withdrawal about not paying proper attention to the region and has

suggested that President Obama did something wrong with respect to departing from Iraq.

But the question is, didn't President Obama pretty faithfully follow the Bush

administration's plan for withdrawing our troops from that region?

That's right. That's the inconvenient truth that Dick Cheney and others like him would

prefer that we don't focus on. President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nure al-Maliki negotiated an agreement at the end of 2008

which stipulated that U.S. forces would be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of 2011.

So what Cheney and other critics are really saying is that they wished that Barack

Obama had departed from that agreement and decided to leave US forces in Iraq longer.

Now there is some truth to the claim that had US forces been left behind after 2011 you could have negotiated a

different agreement that's basically what they're talking about is the

United States the Obama administration should have negotiated something

else but I think that ignores a should have negotiated something else.

But I think that ignores a couple of critical points.

One, I think it's highly unlikely given Iraqi politics that Maliki or anyone else who was Prime Minister of Iraq could have agreed to leaving

...