A good many of us correctly foresaw the ass-kicking. Presumably there are persons among the American elites who are as intelligent as we are. Yet they went in anyway. I've never been quite sure I understood why, but apparently they had their reasons. Whatever those reasons were, why should we believe that they have ceased to operate?
Perhaps they don't think it will be bad for the empire. Perhaps they think that it will be a salutary lesson for other possibly restive subjects if they show that they can schnooker the American public into supporting an open-ended meatgrinder war. The point being, perhaps, that they've gotten better at this sort of thing since Vietnam.
But hell, I don't know what they're thinking. I wasn't in any of the meetings.