On Rick Santorum's Faulty Analogy

Pennsylvania’s junior Senator, Rick Santorum, spoke recently about Iraq and terrorism:

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.”

While it’s always gratifying to find a fan of The Lord of the Rings, a careful student of the story would find Santorum’s analogy–that terrorism in our lives is equivalent to the Eye of Mordor in Middle-Earth–faulty. Why is that?

Consider why the Eye of Mordor was drawn away from Frodo and Sam on the slopes of Mount Doom. Aragorn led the Armies of the West to march toward the Black Gate, to bring the battle to Sauron himself. In Santorum’s view, just as the Eye of Mordor was drawn toward the Black Gate, so too are terrorists and their attentions drawn toward Iraq because of American involvement there.

What Santorum fails to realize is that Aragorn’s attack against Mordor’s armies at the Black Gate was a diversionary tactic. It was to buy time for Frodo and Sam to destroy the Ring, but was unlikely to succeed. From Gandalf’s speech in the chapter The Last Debate, page 862 of the single-volume edition:

‘His doubt will be growing, even as we speak here. His Eye is now straining towards us, blind almost to all else that is moving. So we must keep it. Therein lies our hope. This, then, is my counsel. We have not the Ring. In wisdom or great folly it has been sent away to be destroyed, lest it destroy us. Without it we cannot by force defeat his force. But we must at all costs keep his Eye from his true peril. We cannot achieve victory by arms, but by arms we can give the Ring-bearer his only chance, frail though it be.

‘As Aragorn has begun, so we must go on. We must push Sauron to his last throw. We must call out his hidden strength, so that he shall empty his land. We must march out to meet his at once. We must make ourselves the bait, though his jaws should close on us. He will take that bait, in hope and in greed, for he will think that in such rashness he sees the pride of the new Ringlord: and he will say: “So! he pushes out his neck too soon and too far. Let him come on, and behold I will have him in a trap from which he cannot escape. There I will crush him, and what he has taken in his insolence shall be mine again for ever.”

‘We must walk open-eyed into that trap, with courage, but small hope for ourselves. For, my lords, it may well prove that we ourselves shall perish utterly in a black battle far from the living lands; so that even if Barad-dur be thrown down, we shall not live to see a new age. But this, I deem, is our duty. And better so than to perish nonetheless–as we surely shall, if we sit here–and know as we die that no new age shall be.’

The battle at the Black Gate, then, was a diversionary tactic, launched to draw Sauron’s gaze away from Mount Doom. But it was a suicidal gesture–those of the West who marched to the Black Gate had no expectation of returning home. If the analogy holds, if Santorum is correct, then Santorum must be saying that as a nation we’ve sent our soldiers away as a diversion, to put them in harms way for no gain, with every expectation that they will die and no expectation that they will ever return.

Santorum cannot mean that, surely?

This is another example of Santorum’s habit of speaking without thinking. In some respects he reminds me of Hal from Malcolm in the Middle–a very smart man, but one prone to harebrained schemes and lacking the ability to censor his own thoughts. Equating the Iraq War to The Lord of the Rings probably seemed like a good idea to Santorum, but the message his analogy sends is far from what he likely intended.

Santorum needs to go.