Word: norms
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...shield has become a storm, Schwarzkopf is running the show as commander of the allied forces. Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson, fancying themselves cunning battlefield tacticians, liked to direct their generals hither and thither. George Bush, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell know better. Desert Storm, says Cheney, "is basically Norm's plan. It's fundamentally Norm's to execute...
...West Point, the young plebe was known variously as Norm, Schwarzie, Bear and, in recognition of his notorious temper, Stormin' Norman. Nobody ever called him Herb; Norm's father, who detested the name Herbert, refused to inflict it on his son but gave...
Looking back on the West Point years, Norm's old friends still marvel at his single-minded ambition. "He saw himself as a successor to Alexander the Great, and we didn't laugh when he said it," recalls retired General Leroy Suddath, another former roommate. "Norm's favorite battle was Cannae," says Suddath, in which Hannibal in 216 crushed the forces of Rome. "It was the first real war of annihilation, the kind Norman wanted to fight." He desperately wanted to lead his country's forces into a major battle. "We'd talk about these things in the wee hours...
...never personal. He's extremely tough on people when it's necessary to get them to do something, but the next minute he'll throw his arm around their shoulders and tell them what a great job they're doing." If it were at all physically possible, Norm Schwarzkopf's troops would probably do the same to him. The outcome of the gulf war will tell if history wraps him in a similar embrace...
What is at stake in the gulf war is the Vietnam legacy, whether it should be seen as a historical aberration or the historical norm. In Vietnam, was America defeated by a constellation of contingencies, or was character destiny? Did it succumb to an unfavorable local topography (that neutralized American technological superiority), a misapprehension of the enemy and an undermining cultural revolution at home? Or did it succumb to itself, to overweening ambition and moral blindness, to a refusal to acknowledge its own mortality and limits...