Iraq=LOTR

Senator Rick Santorum compares Iraq to "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.

In the LOTR, to draw the Eye away from Mordor, Gandalf and Aragorn led the army of Gondor to the Gates of Mordor to draw out Sauron's army and let Frodo sneak past them. This, they knew, was a suicidal move. As Gandalf said: "We must make ourselves the bait .... We must walk open-eyed into that trap, with courage, but small hope for ourselves." (Chapter IX, 'The Last Debate')

So the Senator is saying the US soldiers in Iraq are bait. They're there to die, just to keep terrorists' attention away from the US for a while.