On MTP this morning, Senator Santorum (in what is, granted, a somewhat convoluted sentence to begin with) used what struck me as both an amusing sounding new phrase, but also a rather strained bit of logic on the international relations front:

And Iran, which is, which is the principal stoker of this, this Shia/Sunni sectarian violence, would love nothing more to see than the Iraqi democracy fail because of that.

You have to watch out for those darn principal stokers.

He went on to argue that the solution to the problems in Iraq and somehow linked to Iran:

This is a tactic of Iran to disrupt the—our, our efforts in Iraq by, in fact, trying to defeat the Sunnis. So there’s, there’s no question, this is a very complex war.But understand, at the, at the heart of this war is Iran. Iran is the, is, is the problem here. Iran is the one that’s causing most of the problems in, in Iraq.

While I would acknowledge that there is Iranian influence in the Iraqi situation, however this has a dangerous ring to it. It seems that Santorum is suggesting that the solution to Iraq runs through Tehran–and all that can do is expand an already troubled war into a broader, more dangerous context. Further, his statements this morning struck me as shifting blame for the war in Iraq away from the fact that we invaded, to somehow being the Iranian’s fault. It had a certain bait and switch quality to it.

He went on later:

I mean, all of those things are things that I think everyone would agree that we are to do. The question is, is you have some, you have, you have sectarian violence you talked about, fomented by Iran, that we are not addressing. So the question is, how do we, how do we cure Iraq, focus on Iran? We need to do something about stopping the Iranians from being the central destabilizer of the Middle East.

MR. RUSSERT: Would you put more troops in Iraq?

SEN. SANTORUM: I don’t know if it’s a question of more troops or less troops. You get—I, I think the focus should not be Iraq, should be Iran.

Again, while acknowledging that Iran is a serious problem, I still have to wonder how a US Senator can say that that main focus should be on Iran when we have roughly 130,000 troops in Iraq and all the immediate problems that that situation presents.

The idea, that seems to be circulating in some circles, that we need to pursue a hot war with Iran whilst we still have unfinished business in Iraq, strikes me as borderline insane. If anything it appears out of sync with reality.