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Indeed, but western elites die and are replaced by other western elites. So, the question "have western elites ever" clearly isn't limited to current year plus nine.
Calling the Gulf war a defensive war is kind of funny once you realize it required sending troops to the other side of the planet and ended with coalition forces stomping the Iraqi military and rolling up to 150 miles away from Baghdad. Doubly so in the context of discussing another "limited defensive operation".
It's a logistical achievement for sure, and Schwarzkopf was no moron. But it's not exactly a total war. My point is that it's not a great example of a genuine strategic challenge because:
If the coalition toppled Saddam and replaced him with a regime loyal to the West we wouldn't be having this conversation. Instead I'd be praising the continued skill of the West at building friends out of enemies in the continuity of what happened in Japan.
But that's not what happened. The Americans had to come mop it up years later and fucked that up really bad.
I don't think you can really say that the coalition consisted of GPs. Britain and France were hardly GPs in the 90s, to say nothing of Saudi and Egypt. Iraq also had a huge military and actually outnumbered coalition forces in terms of troops, tanks, etc.
I'll just dispute that. 1991 Britain and France were still some of the best equipped and trained militaries in the world. And we're only talking military power.
Iraq had a large conscript army with decent Soviet equipment. But they were no North Korea.
It's no shame, but It was not a fair fight. The main difficulty was force projection. Which is something that I'll gladly concede the West has gotten scarily good at.
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