Iraq had one of the largest militaries in the world at the time of Desert Storm. They had tons and tons of arms and equipment and a huge standing army to counter the persistent threat (and/or to provide their own threat) of resumed hostilities with Iran (that war was still pretty recent when Desert Storm took place)

I would agree that the US is notably terrible at occupations and getting involved in civil wars, at least since WWII, but Desert Storm was pretty much an unqualified slam-dunk take-a-victory-lap success against one of the top armies in the world that wasn’t an ally or a nuclear state—carried out on the other side of the planet from the US, to boot. Like I think Iraq was ranked top-10 at the time by many ways of reckoning military strength, and that wasn’t enough to effectively resist the US effort at all, really.

If that war seems small, it’s only possible for it to seem that way from the victor’s perspective, and only because we did such an amazingly good job of totally destroying Iraq’s substantial capacity to fight in a matter of weeks. In terms of deployed and engaged men and materiel it was really big, just fast because it was so very one-sided, and “cheap” in terms of casualties on the US side for the same reason.