This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 15, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The call is rising for the United States to intervene somehow in the Qadhafi regime's oppression in Libya.

Cato Institute Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy

Studies, Ted Galen Carpenter argues,

the US should maintain a low profile

or possibly be perceived as having crafted an outcome in a region suspicious of U.S.

intentions.

It's important that we remember that there are two rather different kinds of uprisings taking place in the Middle East.

The first kind consists of revolts against longstanding authoritarian U.S. clients like Mubarak in Egypt.

The other kind of revolts are those in places like Libya and Iran where the United States has been on bad terms with the ruling

elites. In the first case the United States has to maintain a very low profile because there's going to be a lot

of suspicion about our intentions.

And therefore, any high profile activity that we engage in, suspicions are going to grow,

that we're trying to hijack those revolutions for our own purposes.

The United States is so very unpopular in that part of the world with

negative ratings usually in the 70s, the 80s, very, very high.

With Libya and Iran, we have somewhat greater latitude because we're not resented for having supported

their oppressors, but even there we have to proceed with

some caution.

Kadhafi seems intent on holding on to power no matter what happens and so this call begins to rise up what is the

West to do and when people say the West they mean the United States what is the West to do and when people say the West they mean the United States. What is the West to do?

...