Demands of Iraqi tar baby starting to *really* worry US Military

[astro]

Retired General Is Going to Iraq for Full Review

WASHINGTON, Jan. 6 - The Pentagon is sending a retired four-star Army general to Iraq next week to conduct an unusual “open-ended” review of the military’s entire Iraq policy, including troop levels, training programs for Iraqi security forces and the strategy for fighting the insurgency, senior Defense Department officials said Thursday.

The extraordinary leeway given to the highly regarded officer, Gen. Gary E. Luck, a former head of American forces in South Korea and currently a senior adviser to the military’s Joint Forces Command, underscores the deep concern by senior Pentagon officials and top American commanders over the direction that the operation in Iraq is taking, and its broad ramifications for the military, said some members of Congress and military analysts.

In another sign that the Iraq campaign is forcing reassessments of Pentagon policies, Army officials are now considering whether to request that the temporary increase of 30,000 soldiers approved by Congress be made permanent. One senior Army official said Thursday that the increase is likely to be needed on a permanent basis if the service is to meet its global commitments - despite the additional cost of $3 billion per year.

At a meeting Thursday with his top military and civilian aides, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instructed that General Luck look at all areas of the operation, identify any weaknesses and report back in a few weeks with a confidential assessment, senior defense officials said.

“He will have a very wide canvas to draw on,” said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon spokesman. Mr. Di Rita emphasized that Mr. Rumsfeld was very satisfied with his commanders in Iraq, but wanted to give them all the help they needed in assessing “the very dynamic situation.”

General Luck, who was a senior adviser to Gen. Tommy R. Franks at his war-time headquarters in Qatar during the Iraq campaign in 2003 and knows the operation in Iraq well, will lead a small team of military specialists. A principal focus will be to address one of the biggest problems facing the military in Iraq today: how to train Iraqi soldiers and police officers to replace the American troops now securing the country. Commanders have expressed disappointment in the performance of many of the Iraqi forces.

The assessment of how rapidly Iraqis can begin shouldering the security burden is driving a separate set of painful, high-level discussions at the Pentagon, where senior officials are calculating how to sustain a large force in Iraq. The number of American military personnel in Iraq rose this month to 150,000, the largest deployment since Baghdad fell.

[friedo]

Who or what is an Iraqi tar baby?

[Necro_Romancer]

@a dictionary

A situation or problem from which it is virtually impossible to disentangle oneself.

I’ve never heard of the expression either.

[Hunter_Hawk]

The original tar baby.

[butter_pie]

you never heard the story briar rabbit and the tar baby?

I’m only 24 and I knew that one…

[Airman_Doors_USAF]

For those of you that don’t look at links, it was in a story where Brer Bear and Brer Fox trap Brer Rabbit by making a baby out of tar. When the baby doesn’t respond when Brer Rabbit speaks to it Brer Rabbit punches the tar baby in the nose and gets stuck, and then gets further into the goop the harder he tries to extricate himself.

I knew that book would come in handy, although I didn’t expect it to be 25 years after I first read it.

[friedo]

Well that makes sense then.

So.

What in the hell is a Brer anyway?

[Airman_Doors_USAF]

I believe it’s “Uncle Remus” for briar, because Brer Rabbit lives in a briar patch. In the same story, once Brer Rabbit is caught he says to Brer Bear and Brer Rabbit “Oh, whatever you do, don’t throw me into the briar patch!”, and so after trying to come up with horrible things to do to Brer Rabbit they eventually toss him in the briar patch because Brer Rabbit kept begging them not to do it. It was a setup, of course, because all they did was send him home without knowing it. It was sort of an early version of “You got me dead to rights, Doc. Would you like to shoot him now or wait until you get home?”.

Ah, how I long for the days when you could watch stuff like that without everyone and their sister being uptight about it and trying to censor it.

[Hunter_Hawk]

@Airman Doors

I believe it’s “Uncle Remus” for briar

No, it’s another form of the word “brother”.

[Airman_Doors_USAF]

There ya go. Thanks. You learn something new every day.

[if6was9]

Like the administration will listen to the reccomendations of anyone… :rolleyes: