{"id":728,"date":"2012-12-28T13:48:00","date_gmt":"2012-12-28T13:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/highplainsblogger.wordpress.com\/2012\/12\/28\/rip-stormin-norman"},"modified":"2012-12-28T13:48:00","modified_gmt":"2012-12-28T13:48:00","slug":"rip-stormin-norman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=728","title":{"rendered":"RIP, Stormin\u2019 Norman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Our nation keeps losing high-profile warrior-heroes. Others remain and for as long as we\u2019re involved in conflicts, we\u2019ll produce more of them.<\/p>\n

We said goodbye recently to Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, a Medal of Honor recipient and World War II veteran. Before that we bid farewell to former Sen. George McGovern, a decorated bomber pilot and fellow WW II vet. Of course, we\u2019re losing many of our Greatest Generation combatants daily as age takes its toll among them.<\/p>\n

And now it\u2019s retired Army Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf who\u2019s left us. Stormin\u2019 Norman served two combat tours in the Vietnam War, led the American invasion of Grenada in 1983 to free captive U.S. medical students and then, most famously, led the allied assault in early 1991 on Kuwait to free that nation from its Iraqi occupiers.<\/p>\n

Schwarzkopf was a larger-than-life figure. He was a man\u2019s man who stood tall during those now-legendary press briefings, where he gave detailed accounts of the progress of the military campaign to boot Saddam Hussein\u2019s forces out of Kuwait.<\/p>\n

One of the obituaries I\u2019ve read in the past few hours noted some criticism of the general\u2019s strategy during the Persian Gulf War. It said some armchair generals back home \u2013 including those in Congress \u2013 had criticized Schwarzkopf for not pressing the fight further, for not capturing Baghdad and getting rid of Hussein when he had the chance.<\/p>\n

The criticism was idiotic.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon had clear orders from the commander in chief, President George H.W. Bush: Kick the Iraqis out of Kuwait \u2026 period. The president, using his immense diplomatic skill, had secured a United Nations mandate to support that effort. The mandate drew the line at liberating Kuwait. President Bush wasn\u2019t going to violate the UN edict and he instructed his field commander, Stormin\u2019 Norman, accordingly.<\/p>\n

And as Schwarzkopf and others noted at the time, taking the fight to Baghdad would have cost many more American casualties \u2013 as the nation would learn when it invaded Iraq in March 2003 ostensibly to rid the Middle East of Hussein\u2019s \u201cweapons of mass destruction,\u201d which we would learn to our profound shame did not exist.<\/p>\n

Gen. Schwarzkopf served his country with honor and valor. He now can rest in peace.<\/p>\n\n

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Our nation keeps losing high-profile warrior-heroes. Others remain and for as long as we\u2019re involved in conflicts, we\u2019ll produce more of them. We said goodbye recently to Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, a Medal of Honor recipient and World War II veteran. Before that we bid farewell to former Sen. George McGovern, a decorated bomber … Continue reading RIP, Stormin\u2019 Norman<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}