RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Eighteen months ago, before a dinner honoring him in Kuwait, the general's hosts had suggested that appropriate dress would be the traditional \o7 dishdasha \f7 robe and he had thought to himself, "Holy smokes, Schwarzkopf is going to dress up like the Kuwaitis and all the Arabs are going to say, 'Who the hell does this guy think he is?' "

The general, though, was easily persuaded, and before dinner he took possession of a splendid embroidered \o7 dishdasha \f7 delivered to his hotel room. He slipped it over his bear-like frame and studied his image in the mirror, first from one perspective, then the other.

"It's wonderful," he said. And suddenly Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf was waltzing with his reflection, doing the same little three-step that T. E. Lawrence, widely known as Lawrence of Arabia, had done in the desert when he shed his British uniform for Arab robes and went on to form an alliance of Arabian tribes.

If Schwarzkopf is not Norman of Arabia, he is at least a soldier with the heart of a romantic, a man intrigued by Arab history and culture and a man who has followed his famous father's footsteps through the sands of the Middle East to lead a war that may shape the world into the 21st Century.

"The stakes," he says, "are higher than any conflict since World War II."

Gruff, engaging, sometimes hot-tempered, Schwarzkopf has a hearty laugh that can be heard down the corridor and a presence that fills the room. He is 6-foot-4, 240 pounds, with linebacker shoulders, upper arms as big as tree trunks--and a row of four stars on his collar. Sometimes he refers to himself in the third person. He seems to like privates as much as colonels and colonels more than politicians, and he makes his points with a furrowed brow and eyes that hold steady like a laser-guided bomb. No one ever left a meeting with him wondering who was in charge.

"What would I change about myself?" he asks. "I would probably"--he reaches for the words carefully--"want . . . a little more . . . patience. I wish I wasn't so quick to anger. Any time I anger, I feel terrible about it afterwards, and if I ever think I have devastated a human being because of my temper, I always make it a point to go back to them and apologize.