Jim Antle makes the understatement of the year:

Santorum has also given little indication of having learned from the foreign policy blunders of the Bush years.

What makes Santorum a bit different from other hawkish candidates this cycle is that he doesn’t avoid the subject of Bush-era foreign policy. Gingrich was every bit as much the vocal proponent of invading Iraq, but you don’t hear him talk about it now. Most of the things that Antle and I would call foreign policy blunders Santorum still supports today as much as he ever did, and he is happy to tell people about it. I don’t think any other 2012 pro-war candidate has presented his support for the Iraq war as an example of his support for spreading freedom as Santorum does here:

I supported America’s security and freeing Muslims and others from oppression in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Santorum has been an outstanding example of an Iraq war supporter who not only never learned from the mistake of the war, but also continues to repeat talking points from 2003-2004 as if he really believes them to be true. Invading Iraq seriously damaged U.S. interests, wasted thousands of American lives, left tens of thousands of Americans wounded, destroyed Iraq’s ancient Christian communities, and resulted in the deaths of 100,000+ Iraqis and the displacement of millions. Iraq is an unfree country ruled by a semi-authoritarian, sectarian government, but it is also a much more dangerous and poorer place to live than it was before the war. Santorum voted for a policy that devastated an entire people and cost the U.S. greatly in lives and wealth, and even now he boasts about it as if it were something admirable.

Santorum is probably one of a handful of former or current office-holders convinced that the biggest problem with Bush’s foreign policy was that it wasn’t always as aggressive as it could have been. Like Republican hawks who thought that Reagan had gone “soft” on the USSR in his second term (or, for some of them, as early as December 1981), Santorum positioned himself as a critic of the Bush administration after 2005 because Bush was not calling the enemy by its proper name and wasn’t doing enough to confront Iran. Santorum would probably say that the main “blunder” of the Bush era was not challenging Iran more directly. He still thinks that his landslide defeat in 2006 is a testament to his political courage rather than proof that the public rejected the hard-line ideology he was peddling. The “lesson” Santorum learned from 2006 is that he was right all along, and didn’t need to make any changes to the way he thought about the U.S. role in the world, which is why he continues to advocate horrible policies with all of the zeal of an Iraq war supporter in 2003.