In an interview with the editorial board of the Bucks County Courier Times, embattled Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum has equated the war in Iraq with J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.” According to the paper, Santorum said that the United States has avoided terrorist attacks at home over the past five years because the “Eye of Mordor” has been focused on Iraq instead.

“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said. “It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S. You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”

Via Backwards City.

Words just fail me. Right now, I wish I was still living in Pennsylvania, so I could vote against Rick Santorum in the upcoming election.

Aside from being what is possibly the most disturbingly stupid perspective on the war in Iraq that I’ve yet heard, Santorum’s analogy just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on a literary level. Has he read Tolkien’s books? Has he even seen the movies? Frodo and Sam don’t journey through Mordor as a goddamn distractionary tactic. Our troops should not be left to die by the thousands in the hope that it will distract terrorists and keep them safely abroad. This is more of the same reprehensible “flypaper theory” that Republicans continue to tout — which, even if the evidence backed it up, even if there was any reason to think it could be an effective military strategy, fails to acknowledge that human soldiers, American citizens and our allies, are what’s being used as the flypaper. It’s a theory that effectively reduces these soldiers to little more than bait.

Santorum’s Middle Earth analogy might make more sense if, instead of heading into Mordor where the true evil lay, Frodo and Sam had taken a little side journey in order to invade nearby troubled Gondor — if they’d decided to fight the orcs or ring-wraiths that turned up in the chaos afterwards rather than go after real dangers to the Shire, like Osama bin Sauron.