Effective? You mean like all the botched operations and wars in the past 60 years or more? The US has no obligation to send our sons and daughters to fight for other countries, none.
“...The US has no obligation to send our sons and daughters to fight for other countries, none.” [Pining_4_TX, post 66]
The strategic importance of a particular action has nothing to do with the likelihood of its successful completion. Each attribute is measured along a different axis.
“Gee, this action turned out to be tougher than we expected, so its utility in the service of national interest wasn’t worth the effort we’d originally guessed might be needed” is the lowest, most despicable form of after-the-fact reasoning: barely deserves the epithet “puerile.” A case of “sour grapes”?
“Doing nothing” - withdrawing from the world - is not a course of action real people can actually choose to take, in the real world. Nevertheless, many of our fellow citizens want to run things that way. The fact that so many deem it possible, or morally preferable, says more about their deficient and immature understanding of reality, than about their abilities to take stock of the national interest and frame feasible policy goals to advance such.