This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 23rd, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The decades-long conflict in Somalia has turned somewhat, offering the United States an opportunity to learn from the failures

of previous interventions.

Journalist David Ax is author of the new Cato Papers Somalia Reducks, a more hands-off

approach, comments on what the U.S. should have learned from our long

experience with Somalia. Large-scale military intervention in Somalia does not work.

The land is too inhosp, and the country's problems too deep for a large ground force to work.

Not that large ground forces often work,

but in those cases that they do, I think,

the conditions are very different than those we see in in

Somalia. Somalia is a the I think the textbook definition of a potential quagmire for for land armies so if you

need to intervene in Somalia you have to do it without deploying a lot of troops.

How well understood is what you just said to policymakers currently in the U.S.

I think they get it.

They may not get it as well as I'd like them to,

but they get it.

Our approach to Somalia since 9-11, since the War on Terror

rubric sort of came into, came to apply is has been to use covert operations in Somalia, air strikes, drone strikes,

missile strikes, commando raids, special forces assistance to other militaries that are operating

in Somalia.

In other words, to have a military presence, but to keep it as quiet and small scale as possible.

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