Jackson, Miss. ? Republican presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas said Monday night in Mississippi that the Senate deserves a chance for an open debate on GOP-sponsored resolutions about the handling of the Iraq war.

“We need to debate and vote on the Iraqi war resolutions, but we need to have more than one option before us,” Brownback said at a news conference before speaking at a Presidents Day dinner.

Brownback said it was “highly unusual” and “inappropriate” of the Democratic majority leader, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid, to allow a vote only on a Democratic-sponsored resolution against President Bush’s effort to boost troop levels in Iraq.

On Saturday, Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic push for a resolution to repudiate Bush’s deployment of additional combat troops. The 56-34 vote fell four short of the 60 needed. Democrats claimed victory, noting that a majority of senators voted against the escalation.

Brownback voted with the majority of Republicans to block the resolution, though he has said he is against the idea of sending more troops to Iraq. On Monday, he said it would be a “travesty” to cut war funding.

Brownback also said: “I think in some respects the war on terrorism is misnamed.”

“Terrorism is a tactic,” he said. “It doesn’t describe who it is that we’re fighting. And I think we have to recognize who we’re fighting.

“We’re fighting this militant interpretation of Islam. We are confronting them in many places around the world. They have an objective. Number one is to remove us from the Middle East. And number two is to establish an Islamic caliphate, which would be an Islamic dictatorship. We do not have a role in a war or a fight between Sunni and Shia in Islam. We have no dispute with Islam.”

Brownback said that’s why he is pushing for “a three-state, one-country solution” in Iraq, creating a Kurdish region, a Sunni region and a Shiite region, and having Baghdad as the federal city.

Brownback also touched on issues important to the conservative base of the Republican Party, speaking against same-sex marriage and for restraint in federal spending.