Just when you thought Santorum had totally gone off his hinges, POW, another one comes loose.
From Salon:
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."
What strikes me, reading this quote, is that it betrays a fantasy world where there are Hobbits somewhere out there, a lone Frodo guarding a ring that will be the end of terrorism. Ricky, there are no hobbits. There is no secret key that will unlock a thousand doors, there is no ring that holds the power, there is no magic wand that can be waved, though for a while, the President kept wishing he had one.
Further, we are not fighting some faceless wizard, some concentrated power that manufactures orcs to sweep the plains and kill the women and burn the villages. The power is not centralized and these are all people fighting on both sides. Even the worst of the terrorists are human, though sometimes seemingly devoid of humanity.
This occupation cannot be won. Because a war like this requires trust, both on the part of the occupiers and the occupied and that trust is gone. It was abused in Abu Ghraib, it was harmed by the stray bombs of "Shock and Awe", it slipped every night that the power didn't come on as promised.
I wonder though how many Americans somehow still believe that there is a winning lottery ticket with their name on it, a secret word that will open all the doors for them and a little Hobbit out their somewhere who soon is going to drop a ring into the fire and wake them from the bad dream that these last several years have been.