Yesterday, Sen. Rick Santorum tried to explain the war in Iraq by drawing an analogy to the Lord of the Rings:
As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else…. 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.
Really, Santorum should have known better. By invoking LOTR, he was inviting the scrutiny of hordes of Tolkien fans, who, sure enough, are unleashing their fantasy-lit fury on him. First off, Santorum called it the Eye of Mordor, when it’s really the Eye of Sauron. Jeeze! Scott Rosenberg exposes more flaws in Santorum’s comments:
First of all, in Tolkien’s saga, the good guys are outgunned and outmanned by the Dark Lord, whereas in our world, the U.S. is a “hyperpower” whose military, in 2001-2, seemed to bestride the world. Second, in Tolkien, the good guys sent Frodo with the Ring into the depths of Mordor as a sort of last-ditch, bet-everything gamble; then they sent an army to the gates of Mordor as a diversion — to keep the Eye occupied and distract it from the hobbits headed for Mount Doom.
David Weigel at Reason‘s Hit and Run further explains how Santorum’s comments failed to reflect the geopolitical complexities of Middle Earth:
Was Santorum referring to the hobbits’ final approach up Mount Doom, when Aragorn (George Bush) was convincing the men of Gondor (Tony Blair) and Rohan (John Howard) to make a final, diversionary push at the Black Gates? Or is he referring to the entire quest of Frodo and Sam (300 million Americans), which was aided at various points by mystical creatures – the Ents, the Dead Men of Dunharrow – that don’t have any easy relations in the real war on terror?
And Rosenberg again:
It’s hard, in truth, to find any useful Middle Earth analogy to the Iraq War: the parallels break down across the board. Still, you might think of Bush’s invasion of Iraq as the equivalent of a beleaguered Gondor, attacked by the armies of Mordor across the River Anduin, sending its army off on an expedition to Far Harad, after its leaders issued proclamations that the White Council had incontrovertible evidence of the Haradrim’s possession of Rings of Mass Destruction.
So wait, if Bush is Aragorn, does that mean Condi Rice is Arwen?
