Profile: Gen Tommy Franks: He collects antiques, likes country music and eats Tex-Mex food. That's how one observer summed up the personality of Gen Tommy Franks, head of US Central Command and chief military commander of the allied war effort in Iraq.
Another description: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is the hammer and Tommy Franks is the nail. Like them or loathe them, the pair are setting the pace of events these days.
Politicians are notoriously sensitive about two things: their primacy in the decision-making process and their place in the limelight. Franks is famously self-effacing, unlike the military commander in the first Gulf War, Gen "Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf, who seemed happiest at centre-stage.
While he is reported to have disagreed privately with Rumsfeld on Iraqi strategy, Franks goes to great pains to defer to his political superiors in public and avoid being drawn into directly political issues. His first news conference of the war at the weekend was studded with quotations from President Bush and references to "my boss" Donald Rumsfeld, and he deflected a tricky question about the Turkish army's incursion into northern Iraq with: "That's sort of above my pay grade."
But when it comes to more military matters, the cold steel shows. Referring to the possibility that the Iraqi regime might use a weapon of mass destruction, he paused and, in a moment of chilling bluntness, reminded them of Rumsfeld's warning: "Don't use it."
There was another drop in temperature when he outlined US policy in the event of the use of such weapons: "We win." For a man so notoriously retiring who rarely gives interviews, Franks attracts enormous media attention. When Saturday's news conference was announced, every seat in the spacious briefing room at the Coalition News Centre in Doha, Qatar, was either occupied or reserved over an hour in advance.
What manner of man is this, who has such a pivotal role at this stage in history? His background is humble: he was born the son of a mechanic in Wynnewood, Oklahoma, in 1945. The family moved shortly afterwards to Midland, Texas, where he attended the same high school as the future Laura Bush, although the President's wife apparently does not remember him. Tommy R. (for Ray) Franks went on to the University of Texas at Austin, but dropped out and enlisted in the army.
When George Bush was piloting a plane for the Texas National Guard, Franks was an artilleryman in Vietnam. During his time there, he was wounded three times and picked up three Purple Hearts, one of the highest decorations in the US army, although precise details of his acts of bravery are hard to obtain.
Reviled by the left, liberals and the peace movement who are horrified by his campaigns in Afghanistan and now Iraq, Franks is said to be popular with the ordinary troops. Having worked his way up from private to four-star general without passing through the elite military academy at West Point, the "muddy-boots soldier" certainly speaks their language.
His deadpan, country-boy approach also appeals to them. "Whoa, whoa, whoa," he told a reporter who was getting carried away at the news conference. Unlike the average politician, when Franks does not know the answer to a question, he says so.
Asked about Saddam Hussein's whereabouts, he said: "I have no idea where he is right now."
Asked a similar question later, he said: "I don't know if he is alive or not."
Questioned on CNN as to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden, he replied: "He's either inside Afghanistan or he's not." Confessing your ignorance is in breach of every rule of spindoctoring, but it works for Franks. A shrewd analyst of the military scene observed: "He is very smart about not being too smart."
The down-home, meat-and-potatoes exterior belies the intelligence of a man who holds all the strands of a highly-complex and technologically sophisticated campaign in his hands. On the face of it, Franks should easily win this war, but one wonders how much the tall Texan understands the depth of Iraqi nationalism.
Franks may be the most high-profile US general since Douglas MacArthur but his downbeat style is the antithesis of the latter's grandiloquent approach. MacArthur had to run Japan for two years after the second World War and there are plans for Franks to be the American pro-consul in Iraq for a two-year period, if and when the regime is overthrown, although some in the Iraqi opposition have other ideas.
Franks got into a spot of bother recently, following a complaint from an anonymous subordinate who reportedly said that he let his wife Cathy sit-in on classified briefings, failed to pay her fare on official trips and assigned her a military bodyguard and an officer to run errands, but he was cleared by an official investigation which found only that he had "inadvertently" discussed top-secret matters in front of his spouse.
Legend has it, that every morning back home, as he leaves for work, Cathy Franks kisses her husband and says: "Go make the world safe for democracy."
The general's stock answer is not recorded but it is most likely to be: "Yes, ma'am."