It appears Prez Gee Dubya will deliver his new strategy for Iraq on Wednesday evening. The latest news seems to indicate that Bush will opt for a “plus-up” of tens of thousands of troops rather than a “surge.” Just whatever the hell is the difference may be left up to confused lexicologists for centuries to come.
While most everything that the Bush administration has touched has turned into crap, one might say that this bunch does have a penchant for putting lipstick on a pig. Take, for instance, the new Iraq strategy which is being unveiled as the “New Way Forward.”
The zippy little slogan oozes with positivity. It’s new (supposedly). It’s a way (well, one way at least). And, it’s forward, at least that is how it will be spun.
No matter how much the plan to plus-up-surge-flood Iraq with tens of thousands of troops might work, or not, a problem exists that must have been overlooked by the normally detail-oriented young Republicans in the Bush bunker. The name New Way Forward, you see, sounds painfully similar to the “Great Leap Forward” program launched during the late 1950s-early 1960s in Communist China by Mao Tse-tung.
Chairman Mao’s plan was simple enough. They would transform a backwards agrarian economy into one that would befit a major Communist industrial nation. According to Wikipedia’s passage in the link above:
“Mao believed that progress and its resulting abundance of goods, if implemented fearlessly, could come in great leaps and bounds. The plan is generally agreed to have failed in its intentions, leading to millions of deaths plus widespread economic dislocation, and is widely regarded both in and out of China as an unmitigated policy disaster.”
Ooh. One would suppose that it wasn’t that great after all. We should all hope and pray, if you do that sort of thing, that the New Way Forward will not result in the unmitigated disaster that was the Great Leap Forward. But then, maybe the philosophies of Chairman Mao and Chairman Gee Dubya aren’t all that far apart. In parting, ponder this quotation of Chairman Mao:
“Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.'” — “Problems of War and Strategy” (November 6, 1938), Selected Works, Vol. II, p. 224.
Any similarities between yesterday and today are purely coincidental. Right?