This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, May 4th, 2015. I'm Caleb Brown.

What is the United States trying to accomplish in Syria?

U.S. involvement in these conflicts is often sadly both contradictory and counterproductive.

Cato Institute Visiting Research Fellow Emma Ashford spoke on the subject last week.

It's kind of strange to be discussing strategy when we're in the fifth year of a conflict,

but this is coming up in large part because the last six to nine months have seen a

fundamental shift in the Syrian conflict with the rise of ISIS that drew the US

in. We've been resisting getting involved for a very long time.

The White House finally decided that they would get involved in September.

And since then we've been spending about $10 million a day bombing ISIS.

This campaign has had some successes, depending on how you define success.

We killed about 6,000 Syrian rebels, sorry, not Syrian rebels, ISIS members, maybe as many as 8500,

that's about 20 to 30 percent of ISIS total strengths.

But how useful this has been is very questionable.

So with a few key exceptions,

we've really not taken out much of the ISIS leadership.

And ISIS appears to be so effective in their PR strategy and recruitment that some sources estimate that ISIS is recruiting people fast enough to offset their losses from the bombing campaign.

We may not be making much of an impact at all. But more

interesting from the point of view of this panel's topic is the fact that almost all

of these games have been in Iraq, not in Syria.

Only about a quarter of the casualties

that ISIS has suffered have been in Syria.

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