The question is why I or anyone else should have thought it would be otherwise. There are some large and pretty serious matters involved here, but I’ll start with the least momentous and perplexing of them - the experts, the pundits, my own journalistic trade, the think-tankers and retired pooh-bahs (there is no such thing as an ex-Marine, one hears, and probably - I add - no such thing in the age of television and the op-ed page as a retired pooh-bah). They just keep going and going. Some of these people who were quickest with their analyses and most irredeemably wrong in their conclusions are continuing almost compulsively to share their reflections with tens of millions of viewers within moments of hearing of some new event or other.

It is said there was a great national revulsion at all this during the time of the American combat. I don’t wonder. A kind of insensitive, suffocating, all-enveloping smugness can be conveyed by those who undertake to lecture without so much as an occasional “I think “or “maybe” or (God forbid) “I don’t know” as part of their text. But there should be no surprise in the fact that, apparently unembarrassed and unshaken, they keep at it - that’s in the nature of the trade.

What else just keeps going and going is by orders of magnitude more important and more serious: the fighting in the gulf and the bitter argument about the proper American role. But when you think about this too you realize that there was never any chance that it could all come to a clean, neat, satisfying halt in the time span we (1) allotted it and (2) then believed we had even been able to cut in half. I remember listening to President Bush’s announcement that the war was effectively over and our forces would fairly soon be coming home and thinking how incredibly different it was from Vietnam, which had seemed to have neither a beginning nor an end. In fact, to be truthful I think I was like a lot of other Americans in wondering on that first night that the bombing was announced and when its effects were reported so extravagantly, whether the whole action wouldn’t begin and end within a few days.

But this is the American illusion, shared by journalists, politicians, officials and public alike. Especially in this day of insistent, unending mass communication and news glut, with the whole country glued to the tube and attentive to the tidy, coherent stories - mini-dramas - we persist in making of the news, and impatient for this one to be over so the next can start, all turmoil, domestic and international, gets reduced to these short tales. We stuff events into tiny time frames and are very selective about which events we include in any case. Whatever the going wisdom may be on the negativism of the press, the culture as a whole prefers happy endings and generally gets them. But this it does by leaving out what comes after the artificially imposed and premature “conclusion” of the story, thereby setting itself up for either eventual disillusion or another of those zingy debates we have about who sabotaged, sold out, lost or otherwise perverted what had been a settled success story.

Our whole interpretation of the exciting events in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union over the past couple of years illustrates this bent. Gorbachev was an uncomplicated hero, the political deed had been done; the Germanys got together, the Ceausescus got shot, a bunch of attractive artists and intellectuals brought down a bunch of unimaginative Czechoslovak party bureaucrat-thugs, etc. - and we just sort of sang “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead” and figured it was time to pack our bags and go back to Kansas. The dramatically plunged polls of German Chancellor Kohl, the mess in the Soviet Union and all the other unsettled and turbulent circumstances in that part of the world should tell us something about the merit of this approach.

I would offer as a kind of parallel to our thinking about the gulf the lore of the Cuban missile crisis. We have all read the many accounts - with beginning, middle and end - of what is by now understood as a couple of weeks’ tense drama, with the United States turning wise and triumphant at the last, and so on. But that saga had begun long before, in the dangerous misappraisal of John F. Kennedy that Nikita Khrushchev drew from their first summit meeting, which in large part led to his arrogant and reckless conclusion that he could compel Kennedy to accept the Soviet missiles in Cuba. And it didn’t end with the turning around of the Soviet ships, but had a consequential afterlife in the Soviets’ determination never again to be at so severe a strategic disadvantage with us and so to undertake the gigantic nuclear buildup that was the centerpiece of the cold war for years to come. And the story, as we know, is not yet finished.

The gulf war had its origins long before Aug. 2 and long before Jan. 16, and it did not conclude on the day we said it did. The horrible internal conflict, the massacres, the turning of Saddam Hussein (yet again) on his own populations, was perhaps inevitable. History doesn’t stop. I think we should have done more to prevent this, but I do not think an all-out U.S. military engagement in the civil war would have brought peace or been the end of the story or of the turmoil in that country either. While we have been announcing to ourselves not just the outcome of the conflict but all its final political ramifications as well, and planning our victory galas, the next phase - not phase two, but perhaps phase 200 - of that conflict began. Saddam for the moment prevailed. But that will not be the end of the story either. Again, he went too far and all but guaranteed his own ruin. For this we should be grateful that the world, that human history does not conform to our short-story principles.