Libertarians Against Iraqi Liberty?

Glenn links Shannon Love’s critique of Steve Chapman’s piece on Iraq over at Reason, in which he calls for an Iraqi plebiscite on the continuation of a coalition military presence.  Chapman’s take is… well, a bit odd.

In light of the improvement in security over the last year, you would expect most Iraqis to have a new appreciation for our efforts.
…
But that was not the prevailing sentiment last week among Sadr’s followers.

Yes, how strange the very people profiting from the violence and targeted in the the U.S. efforts to reduce violence oppose those efforts.  Does Chapman not know this, or is he deliberately being misleading? Maybe we should be charitable and assume he’s being ironic.

Chapman also cites the February poll of Iraqis in a similarly misleading or ill-informed fashion. He accurately quotes a portion about ”oppos[ing] foreign troops,” adding:

 Yet all indications are that Iraqis can unite behind only one proposition: Yankee, go home!

But he doesn’t link the poll, and perhaps for good reason: contrary to his assertion, the poll more relevantly finds only 38% want coalition forces to leave immediately (p4), down from 47% in August 2007.  And in fact that number is likely overstated, as the poll wildly oversamples Sunnnis (p44), who tend to be most opposed to coalition forces. (The survey puts them at 30%, while most estimates place them at 10-20%.) It’s also likely that number has continued to decline right along with the violence, as it did from Aug to Feb.

Maybe he’s just not familiar with all the details of the poll or maybe he’s cherrypicking, but I’m not betting on irony here. 

It’s worth noting again too, even the smallest adjustment for the sectarian affiliation finds a majority of Iraqis believing the invasion was the right decision.

I’m also struck that a libertarian would be in favor of a result he believes is more likely lead to reduced liberty for Iraqis, even if that result was the based on the outcome of a democratic vote (libertarians above all others should understand democracy is often in conflict with liberty).  Unfortunately, for many libertarians the need to support liberty ends at our borders, and freeing the U.S. from outside commitments trumps whether 25 million people have some semblance of freedom. 

But he’s probably wrong about how that vote would turn out.  So yes, absolutely let’s have a referendum of Iraqis on whether they want our help for another year. Let’s have Iraqis debate whether Iran and the militias or the U.S. really have their best interests at heart. And let’s raise the ante by having the result be binding on both Presidential candidates.