This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 12, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President and Congress appear to want to have it both ways on the situation in Iraq.

The Islamic State, they say, is a massive threat, but they'll fight that threat on the cheap.

And whether or not the President has the authority to take the country to war all by himself,

no one seems really interested in stopping him.

Justin Logan is director of the Cato Institute's Foreign Policy Studies, he comments.

Well, the president actually has been less than clear on this issue.

One of the things that I think has been missing from the debate, despite the gruesome beheadings of James Foley

and Stephen Sautiloff, is that the President of the United States, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, the Department of Homeland Security, and

the FBI have all said that they have no intelligence regarding the Islamic

state or ISIS or ISIL, whichever acronym you care to use, targeting the United States here at home, right?

So they've already killed two hostages, two American hostages by beheading them,

and that in my view requires some response.

But it's very noteworthy that we have now embarked on a third Iraq war in pursuit of a group of people who are offend me on just about every possible

level from the sort of basic human level to the theological to the sartorial, just about anything you can think of, but do not

appear to be targeting the United States according to the people in the U.S. government who are responsible

for assessing threats to the United States.

To the extent we get involved in the war that's taking place across the Iraq-Seria border,

does that decision have any effect on their plans about attacking the United States?

Does it make them more or less likely to attack the US and I think that's been

...