Welcome. This is Anastasia Yuglova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

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In an op-ed he published in the Washington Examiner last week, Kata Policy analyst Justin Logan

urged Americans and the most culpable party is the Bush administration.

Justin, what's the verdict on al-Moliki?

Is he a bailier's prime minister?

Well, I think he's clearly come under criticism lately as the policies that the U.S. administration and the Iraqi administration have been

employing have failed to stem what is a seemingly endless tie to violence in that country.

You can find political commentators as well as

congressmen and women right left and center complaining that the problem in

Iraq is the Maliki government.

And while I think there are clearly things

that Mr Maliki could have done better,

I think that hanging the desperate state of affairs

in Iraq around his neck is somewhat unfair. I was struck in particular at a book

forum that we had here at Cato, I guess about a week or ten days ago with Peter

Galbraith, who made the very fair point that the very nature of the federal

government in Iraq is decentralized, that it does not have this sort of unified power that a government would need to have in such an environment to make these kinds of political problems go away.

So the article just stemmed from as a response to this notion that was being put forth by

commentators right and left that the problem is Maliki and I think that is a grossly simplistic way of looking at things.

Can you really assert with confidence that Maliki bears no responsibility whatever for the failure of government and the increasing violence in Iraq?

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