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Excellent analysis, this is spot on.

Just wanted to do a little elaboration on a couple of points, mainly from my experience - I was 19 at the time and had just started to read The War Nerd column in the eXile (ah, those were the days!).

First of all, you have to remember the context. In '91 Iraq had just fought a bloody years-long war with Iran, they had a lot of hardware and some experience using that equuipment, even though command was very top-heavy and centralized - the old Soviet model (at least that's what many people said back then and since, always seemed plausible to me). So yeah, at least theoretically they were in a somewhat good starting position. But then again the US onslaught was just insane and much bigger in numbers and mass then today. I won't look up the numbers, but it was 500+ US aircraft at least, and like Tervell said, the distances involved where much shorter. You could take off and bomb Iraqi targets within a hour as a US pilot.

Fighting in '91 was quite rough at times. Iraq had Mig-25s and SAMs that actually engaged and shot down US aircraft. Iraq fired Scuds into Saudi and Israel - much smaller than what we saw last week, but it was a factor to consider for US planning and weapons use (much like today, interceptors failed and bombing launchers was much harder than imagined at first). The coalition had to do weeks of preparatory bombing, with 100s of aircraft. There is a YT channel that does these map-based visualizations and they have several videos on the air war, with representative aircraft counts (just search "operations room gulf air war" and skip through the videos to get an idea) - it's just insane seeing the sheer mass of US strike packages flying into southern Iraq and Baghdad, like dozens of aircraft flying in from three different directions and on a very small part of the Iraqi map, so to speak. I'm not gonna link it because they tend to be on the US propaganda side a bit too much for my taste - but I guarantee you they can't do that in Iran now. Too much distance, too much territory to cover, just not enough aircraft.

Terrain was different, too. Kuwait and southern Iraq is mostly just desert, and all these US weapon systems never, ever found a better environment to work in than the Arabian desert. Anytime the war moved to cities, Iraqis might put up a fight and US forces had a much more difficult time (e.g. Battle of Khafji in '91, Battle of Nasiriyah in '03). At the same time, these desert actions featured a lot of friendly fire - totally not unlike today. Back then people joked that the biggest enemy of British combat troops was the USAF/the US Army missile defence corps. Compare that to Iran - endless mountains, endless distance, and all these nice IRGC tunnels; Iraq had no tunnels at all.

Couple thoughts on the ground effort: You have to remember that the US Armed forces were at their absolute peak, maybe ever. You had all that cold war equipment, a huge standing army, and constant training for that Fulda Gap tank action everybody assumed for decades back then. There was probably never a better time for coordinated air campaign-ground warfare pushes from a US perspective, and it showed. Even though, they still took months dismantling the Iraqi Army from the air first. The ground package in '03 was smaller - like Tervell said, they mostly just did a tank rush straight to Baghdad, shooting up everything along the way - and the US forces still needed like 3 weeks for basically 400 miles of desert highway.

A little graph on US troop strength to illustrate my point:

And finally, speaking of distances, one thing I haven't seen talked about a lot is just how far away Iran is from Israel. Imagine you're flying an F-35 mission out of Eilat AFB or whereever. You take off, refuel over Iraq, and then you fly towards Tehran or central Iran - roundabout two hours until you're even on station (!). You have to piss your pants around that point - no toilet in an F-35 - and now you have to fly around two more hours playing whack-a-mole with Iranian targets. Oh, and then it's two more hours back to Israel, piss yourself again on the way, and those go-pills you just popped to stay awake really make you want to poop like, soon-ish. But nooo, you still gotta refuel first, and then the landing part...are we really to believe that every American pilots performs flawlessly under these circumstances? I'd rather believe that like at least half of them fly into Iran, try to shoot their load ASAP to fly home again and take a well-deserved dump in a real toilet. Who cares if you just hit 5 tractor-trailers, half of whom are out of service anyway. Just get the fuck home, you have to do it again tomorrow anyway because there's not enough planes. Add to that the duress of flying over a hostile country, at night, with alarms and warnings from all you super-duper F-35 EOTS going off constantly, and whatever dozen subsystems you have to watch all by yourself... six hours of pure stress in a cramped F-35 cockpit. Yeah no, I fully believe this air campaign is completely different from '91 and '03.

In '91 you take off from a carrier, fly into southern Iraq for 30 minutes tops, do your 1-2 hours on station and fly back again. Might not even have to piss your fly-diaper once, and the biggest challenge is keeping your head straight from all the talk you hear on the 10+ radio nets coordinating 200 coalition aircraft covering 100 square miles or something. And even back then you had plenty of evidence that US pilots just wanted to over-bomb any target they saw and fly the fuck back ASAP.

So yeah, hope I could offer some additional points to your excellent question. Iraq had a solid military in '91 but they just couldn't go up against the US empire at its all-time power peak. 2003 was a smaller war, and an exhausted Iraq faltered under a somewhat comparable air onslaught, and he US still managed to fumble the overall war effort. Iran is different, the US empire is visibly panting, and the geographic aspect of a war that at this point is entirely waged from the air is quite possibly as disadvantageous for an US air campaign as it ever was.