Most of the Iraqi army didn’t fight at all. Their commanders were heftily bribed beforehand by the Americans. For all intents and purposes the US didn’t even fight a real war, they were faced with an opponent that largely didn’t fight back or even turned on their own. It is however indicative of how a real war would have gone that the few Iraqi units that did fight and put up resistance by all accounts caused a huge amount of problems for the American units that were supposed to just steamroll over them, and almost threw their entire plan into disarray.

This “war” also followed a decade of strangulating sanctions on the heels of another war intentionally provoked by the West in which the Iraqi forces were badly mauled when the US persuaded Iraq to retreat out of Kuwait with the promise that they wouldn’t engage the retreating troops but proceeded to bomb the shit out of them anyway. And this after Iraq had already been fighting a devastating years long conflict against Iran, instigated by the Americans and fueled by European and American weapons for the specific purpose of weakening both countries.

So yeah, it’s easy fighting a crippled nation that doesn’t put up a fight, it’s different when you are faced with an enemy that actually fights back as they learned in Vietnam and Afghanistan, no matter how technologically superior you think you are.