This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 30, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown. Military interventions that are done under the banner of humanitarianism

should not be judged by less stringent standards.

The intervention in Libya is no different.

Benjamin Friedman, a research fellow in defense in Homeland Security Studies at the

Cato Institute, says even on humanitarian grounds the war in Libya made

things worse.

Democracy I think we forget sometimes requires salesmanship and that's especially true when we're talking about US foreign policy.

As a rich, technologically adept country surrounded by docile neighbors and water,

that is an incredibly safe state by historical standards.

Our wars are usually remotely linked, linked only in a sort of esoteric way to our

actual security and domestic well-being.

We only fight wars of choice in the United States.

So the leaders advocating them labor

to convince us that they are wise and the actual reason that a US

leader wants a war rarely exhaust the reasons that he or she gives in public

and advocating for it. In the case of Libya, the limited, admittedly limited

historical record suggests that the winning argument, at least in the United

States that got President Obama to support the war

was the humanitarian argument.

And the other arguments, the ones I'm focusing on,

were at best secondary, maybe just PR.

...