This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, October 21st, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

U.S. troops will be out of Iraq by the end of the year, according to President Obama.

But will it happen that way, and does it begin to justify U.S. involvement there?

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

Well, first of all, we have to recognize that it's still possible that the Obama administration could reach an agreement with the Iraqis even at this late hour.

The crucial sticking point is on whether U.S. forces will be governed by U.S. law or by Iraqi law. This is a fairly standard agreement that the

U.S. government, not just the U.S. government, when a foreign government has troops in a foreign country,

there is this presumption of extraterritoriality that the troops will be governed by the laws of their

own state, not by the state where they're stationed.

There are some exceptions to this rule, but it's a pretty standard practice, and I think that it was not

unreasonable for the Obama administration to hold fast to that requirement and I think the fact that the Iraqis

were equally adamant that they would not afford those protections says a lot about just how much they want us to leave.

Now I've always said, I mean when we, of course, you know, we've been talking about Iraq

for a long, long time, I've been talking about Iraq for a long, long time.

I've been talking about Iraq for a long, long time.

I've always said that if this mission was absolutely essential to U.S. national security that with all due respect the opinions

of the Iraqis would not be the determining factor here.

But I also think that the way in which this operation was initiated on the pretense that the Iraqis were genuinely desiring to be rid of Saddam Hussein and therefore to be a sovereign state and therefore to be able to govern their

own affairs, well that kind of at some level kind of begs the question how serious were

we about that if in fact we are not committed to allowing them

to govern themselves and to protect themselves then I think it would have really called into questions a lot of the

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