Fighting Terrorists and Dark Wizards

I know I'm not the first blogger to link to Rick Santorum's rather ludicrous "Eye of Mordor" article. I love The Lord of the Rings as much as anyone, but I'm not sure I want to create foreign policy around it. But anyway, that isn't the point. I just want to express my amazement at a particular argument I've heard made that I think has serious moral problems. Rick isn't the only one whose made it by any means, but he certainly framed it more colorfully than most:

"As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else," Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.

"It's being drawn to Iraq and it's not being drawn to the U.S.," Santorum continued. "You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don't want the Eye to come back here to the United States."

Generally, the more sober version of the argument is the classic "better to fight terrorists in Iraq rather than here at home." (Or as a classic Doonesbury had an Iraq-deployed soldier question Bush "You really think Iraqi troops are poised to invade Yankton, South Dakota....I mean, yes, better here than in Yankton, sir!"). The problem with this line of reasoning, from a moral perspective, is it basically justifies plunging any random country into chaos and destruction so they have to bear the brunt of al-Qaeda's assualt instead of us. It effectively uses Iraqi civilians as human shields in our conflict with terrorism. If the terrorists who would have been attacking America are now attacking Iraq, then the counterfactual is that if we weren't in Iraq, the terrorists wouldn't be attacking Iraqi civilians either (because they'd be fighting us here). Now, like Garry Trudeau's soldier, I'm skeptical that Salafist radicals were poised to attack Yankton. But, under this line of argument, the reason we should be celebrating the Iraq war is because it's worthless Iraqis who are dying, not precious America lives. That's wrong morally, and utterly demolishes any claim these advocates have that we truly care about the prosperity and well-being of the Iraqi people.