This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 6, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

By killing a high-ranking member of the Iranian government last week,

President Trump has undertaken a massive

escalation of hostilities with Iran. Cato's John Glaser and Emma Ashford comment on the new developments.

So the US and Iran obviously have not been friendly for quite a long time, but four decades at this point.

When the US went into Iraq in 2003, the Iranians initially actually offered to cooperate with the Bush

administration and the fight against al-Qaeda, but after that was rebuffed, they backed a number of militias in Iraq, some of which went on to target U.S. service members.

And that's where some of the bad blood between sort of senior US military

officials today and Iran comes from. The man that's probably most single-handedly

responsible for that's a

the general of the Iranian the Kudse force that's a branch of the Islamic

Revolutionary Guard Corps that was killed by the Trump administration by a drone

strike late last week.

And he's often been described as sort of a mastermind of these sort of terror cells and

Shia militias throughout the Middle East.

There's no denying he was a really sort of bad guy working

against not just US interests but fomenting a lot of unrest in the region. really inseparable.

What was Iran's goal, or there may be many of them in its operations in Iraq.

Well, it's pretty predictable behavior for a state like Iran,

hemmed in a dangerous neighborhood surrounded by enemies and having the countries on

its east and west borders invaded and overthrown by the most powerful country in the world

...