The shame was that Timewatch didn't have the courage of its convictions. As it was, the final element of the thesis showed that whatever Schwarzkopf had learnt from the classics, his masters had learnt nothing at all. Hannibal stopped short of the assault on the final military objective because he assumed that an armyless Rome would collapse into civil disorder, leaving it free for a more biddable regime to take over. It didn't, and Rome grew to greater glory. And, as the Stormmeister explained, the Allies, stopped short of taking Baghdad because they assumed that a defeated and humiliated Saddam Hussein would be replaced by an Iraqi with more sympathetic understanding of the west's dependency on Arab oil.
Governments never learn.
And nor, it seems, do TV stations with an eye to the ratings.