This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 28th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

With respect to the drumbeat for war in Syria,

if you leave aside the broad and deep public opposition,

the lack of any

constitutionally required congressional approval, and the fact that no one seems

to have a game plan for after the invasion, the arguments for attacking Syria

just don't make a lot of sense.

Ben Friedman, a research fellow in defense and homeland security studies at the Cato Institute,

discusses the weak case for an attack on Syria.

It's easy to understand historically the

opprobrium, the international norm against chemical weapons use that comes

from the world wars and the experience of that century.

But logically, it's hard to understand

why we should draw a line in the sand

around one particular weapon.

We're essentially saying, you're free to kill civilians in all sorts of terrible ways, but just don't do it with this one weapon.

War, civil war in particular, all war is full of moral atrocities, morally outrageous acts to use the Secretary of State's terms.

And it seems to me that if we're going to object to the murder of civilians, we have a lot more work

to do in Syria and around the world.

So it's difficult for me to see why we single out chemical weapons as opposed to all the other weapons out there.

There's another line of reasoning for air strikes, cruise missile strikes, bomber attacks

...