[dkarl]

You would have been 7 when Desert Storm happened, then. Desert Storm is an episode that will probably be classified as a historical anomaly in hindsight, but in 2001, it was our most recent large-scale military action. Desert Storm was limited, focused, and... wait for the 1990s SNL joke you might be too young to remember... "prudent." Whether it was a good idea or not, whether it accomplished anything positive or not, it seemed to prove we had learned the lessons of Vietnam.

I think that affected everyone's expectations about the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. I was cynical about our motivations and our ability to accomplish anything with the invasions in 2001 and 2003, and was opposed to anything more than punitive action against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but still I did not foresee the scope of what happened. I thought there was no way an American administration could get suckered into the same kind of conflict, led on by the same chronic overpromising from generals. They would know that the generals would never tell the truth about what they could accomplish by military means. They would know a majority of the society would be bitterly polarized against us as foreign invaders. They would know the inherent difficulty of what they were trying to do. They would know they weren't being told the truth about the situation on the ground. They wouldn't make the mistake of accepting unrealistic definitions of victory.

That's probably what Colin Powell was counting on. Instead, we made all the same mistakes over again, and looking back we see the continuity of Vietnam and Afghanistan, with the Gulf War just an anomalous blip in between.

[Kafkish]

The 2003 Iraq war was, most people now know, based on a lie. What most people didn't know, and still don't know, is that Desert Storm itself was based on a lie. Like the 2003 lie, it backfired. It's a long story, but if reading what the US ambassador to Iraq at that time told Saddam will point you in the right direction. She's died years ago, but her name is April Catherine Glaspie [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Glaspie

[_3ddw]

I wrote a different comment, then re-read your comment above, and deleted my original reply.

All I can say is that I thought about Desert Storm when I wrote my original comment. I may have been 7 or whatever, but I did grow up in the period after Desert Storm and I remember clearly how infallible American military might was thought to be in popular opinion.

> That's probably what Colin Powell was counting on.

God knows. Why would you distance Powell from the other "generals would never tell the truth"? I'm not sure I would.

[dkarl]

> Why would you distance Powell from the other "generals would never tell the truth"?

That's a fair question. My first reason was that Powell was in the State Department under W, and the State Department has a more skeptical attitude towards our military capabilities than the military itself does. My second reason, which may be wrong-headed, was that I assumed that the military tendency to misrepresent situations in an optimistic way comes from their desire to do the job. I.e., they say fighting will succeed because it's their job and they want to do it, and then when it isn't going well, they say it's going great because they want to prove that they can do it. Just like a developer downplays the complexity of a challenging project because they're excited about tackling it, and when they get in over their head, they won't admit it because they don't want the project cancelled before they can complete it, no matter how long it takes. (Like that, except with killing.) Since Colin Powell wouldn't be responsible for directing the invasions as a general, I didn't think he would be influenced by that aspect.

EDIT: I think in retrospect what I didn't understand about the Gulf War was that some people viscerally loathed the lessons of Vietnam, hated the idea that the U.S. military could be "defeated," and chose to interpret the Gulf War not as a vindication of applying the lessons of Vietnam, but as proof that the lessons of Vietnam no longer applied. Your comment about the infallibility of American military might reminded me of that.