This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 22nd, 2011. I'm Caleb Brown.

Should we see the collapse of Libya's regime as a victory for U.S. foreign policy, or does it pose

a dangerous precedent for future interventions?

Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute offers his thoughts.

Now that rebels have reached Trivili and as of this recording we don't actually know where Muammar Gaddafi is, I feel like the argument

from Washington for what President Obama contributed to this effort, so to speak, will be hailed as a success and that

we did it on the cheap, that we didn't really give anything up, and that this may lay the groundwork for this kind of

intervention in the future.

That is going to be the argument.

It is the argument that's being made already by those who were calling for intervention sooner than

we did.

First of all, if people were to write the history of the Iraq war immediately after Saddam Hussein statue was torn down in

Firdo Square, we'd have a very different history of the Iraq war than what most people understand.

Does that mean that Libya is likely to descend into horrific violent chaos like Iraq?

No, every country is different.

But the reason why you write a history of war after the war is over and not while the war is still going on is because

the hard work of nation building, nation kind of regime change is the nation-building part.

And as you know, I mean, we've written, Justin Logan and I and Ben Friedman and I have written quite a bit on post-conflict

reconstruction and the role that the United States should play,

the role the US military should play in that process, and I think for all the reasons

that libertarians are traditionally quite skeptical of the government's ability

to fashion a society here in the United States.

...