Yes, ETO was a quagmire. No WMDs found and they never attacked us. After all we are still there 60 years on.
Sorry, I don’t cover for anyone. And, there are lots of F’up in the military, even in the flag ranks that get a lot of Americans killed.
By the way, it was common for departing young men to say that they were finishing their fathers war, WWI, which instead of a decisive defeat of German militarism was an ‘Armistice’. Which everyone knew that a grate part of WW II, in Europe, was because of the conditional surrender, and was why the Potsdam convention agreed on unconditional, total surrender.
The same, liberal, softy view was why GW had to finish off Saddam and his father, with liberal Powell, just called a armistice type cessation in Gulf War One.