desert storm/desert shield was much easier to justify than bush jr's war. iraq invaded kuwait with at least 100,000 troops and hundreds of tanks.

In 1992, the United States Secretary of Defense during the war, Dick Cheney, made the same point: "And the question in my mind is, how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is, not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the President made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq." (from wikipedia:Gulf_War