The Associated Press (AP) is reporting that Republican Tea Party (GOTP) presidential hopeful Rick Santorum is busily criticizing President Barack Obama’s apology for the thoughtless and yet accidental burning of Korans in Afghanistan, adding that Afghanistan should apologize to the United States for the deaths of four U.S. soldiers during six days of violence sparked by the incident.

“There was nothing deliberately done wrong here,” Santorum said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week”. “This was something that happened as a mistake. Killing Americans in uniform is not a mistake. It was something that deliberate.”

First, Rick should remember we’re supposedly at war in Afghanistan – for more than 10 years now – and unfortunately, soldiers get killed after you invade and occupy a country. Second, burning someone’s most holy book is wrong, accidental or on purpose, it’s wrong. Following Santorum’s logic it must be OK to assume if one of his kids breaks a neighbor’s window with a baseball there’s no harm done, no apology is needed, no money should be offered to recompense. If something is accidental you never need to apologize in Santorumville.

Reportedly, more than 30 people have been killed in clashes since it was learned copies of the Koran and other religious materials had been thrown into a fire pit used to burn garbage at Bagram Air Field.

“The response needs to be apologized for by (President Hamid) Karzai and the Afghan people for attacking and killing our men and women in uniform and overreacting to this inadvertent mistake,” Santorum said on NBC’s “Meet the Press”. “That is the real crime here, not what our soldiers did.”

Clearly Santorum is as ignorant on foreign relations as he’s always appeared to be; who is Rick Santorum, “Mr. Christian”, to decide what an appropriate response by a Muslim population is to the burning of the Koran?

Santorum is woefully uninformed as to the situation and to the feelings of other religions, and lately he’s bemoaned – as many uber-conservatives have – the so-called “war on religion” by the Obama Administration for requiring non-profit organizations to provide emergency contraception to their employees as part of their health insurance coverage, but burning a Koran is no big deal? How would he feel if the Taliban had been reported to have “accidentally” burned Bibles? He – and the rest of the right-wing world – would be incensed and claim it was no accident.

The president’s apology suggests that there is blame and that the U.S. did something wrong “in the sense of doing a deliberate act,” Santorum said.

Santorum says that rather than saying he was sorry, Obama should have only acknowledged that burning copies of Islam’s holiest book in a trash pit was wrong and taken responsibility for the incident, “but to apologize, I think, lends credibility that somehow or another that it was more than that.”

Well, perhaps if we hadn’t occupied Afghanistan for 10 years, tortured prisoners, murdered civilians, flushed copies of the Koran down toilets, and had ministers in America burning Korans then the President might’ve been able to have taken that or another stance, but since a former President allowed many of those things to occur under his watch, the current President doesn’t have a lot of options.

If anything is learned from this latest spate of violence it’s that we’ve long overstayed our welcome in Afghanistan; we invaded to punish the Taliban and to get Bin Laden. We got the latter, and the former is up for dispute; it’s time to cut bait and come home. It’s time to leave the people of Afghanistan to their own devices, we’ve been there for more than a decade and it’s had little effect, saving the fact we killed Bin Laden. It’s time to bring all of our people home; it’s time to leave.