Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast

Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 19th. I'm Anastasia Glova. With the

completion of the troop buildup in Iraq last week, the search has again been in the news.

But the news, according to many analysts, is not good.

Violence has not only not abated, but increased, and the Iraqi Congress has made no progress towards compromise.

Yet General David Petraeus and Defense Secretary Robert Gates insist it's too early to judge.

Let's see what Cato's Foreign Policy Director Chris Preble has to say.

The true build-up to 160,000 troops in Iraq has just been completed. In your estimation, is the surge working?

By the criteria that the Bush administration established, the answer is no.

They had hoped to dramatically reduce the violence in Iraq such that they would

carve out a space for political reconciliation. There have been some hopeful

signs in the sense that violence has been reduced in some places, but it has also increased

in other places. And we've seen this pattern in the past, and the nature of the violence has changed,

from more sectarian killing, kind of revenge killing,

and one for one neighborhood by neighborhood now has shifted to more terrorism and car bombs

and those kinds of things. But the key point is that there has been

very little if any progress on political reconciliation. The two key points

being the sharing of oil revenues between the three main groups and some semblance of a desire or

willingness on the part of the Iraqi politicians to take greater and greater responsibility

for security.

Neither of those things have happened and again that is the

criteria the president set forth as being why the surge was instituted and so I think by

...