This is a Cato Special Podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. President Obama is said to be

considering sending deadly aid to rebels in Syria even though the public is

opposed to broad US involvement. The conflict is not challenge vital U.S. interests and it's not really

clear what the United States would get out of it. After that, the fact that the people the U.S.

would be arming aren armed exactly friends.

Chris Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato

Institute, discusses the latest.

According to several different news stories, including in the New York Times this morning, the Obama administration is apparently for the

first time considering giving lethal assistance to the Syrian rebels.

So this is significant because while we have been providing non-lethal assistance primarily to the refugees and to some extent to the rebel groups the Assad regime opposition

those who are opposed to the Assad regime

the provision of lethal assistance has always been seen as something

of an important milestone and the rationale or at least the justification that the Obama administration is using is the

discovery that Assad for now the second time Assad's forces have apparently used chemical

weapons.

Now this is not the first time this has been alleged and it was widely reported a few months ago

that there had been chemical weapons used, there was some disagreement as to who was guilty of that

but once there was once people were confident that it was in fact government forces

then people invoked President Obama's red line from last year

when he said that the use of chemical weapons would in fact be a red line.

So I think there was a plausible argument that in the well first of all that was a that was a foolish

commitment to make there are a whole host of reasons why chemical weapons per se should not

...