It's hard enough that a lot of people can't. Like Eturnal, apparently. As well as both you and I, fwiw.
Were we right to enter WWII? Derp. Better question. Were we right to enter WWI?
WWII was a conventional military conflict against another nation-state, not a band of criminals, and it was won by a citizen-army, not a professional army. There's zero commonality between WWII and the current situation, and people only like to link the two because they want to relive the perceived glory of WWII.
The whole "kill people and break things" doesn't work and never has. It didn't work in Roman times either. I'm willing to bet you have no clue what the Social War was. Go figure.
More immediately, Vietnam and Korea proved that doesn't work in the here and now either. Before America's time, Clausewitz said, "War is politics by other means". That's always been true, what matters isn't the killing people and breaking things, it's how you leverage that capacity. That's where the political side comes in. If the strategy stops there then the result will be defeat every time. Go read about the epilogue to the Peloponnesian War and what happened when the Spartans tried to take over Athens.
The military has been less effective because it's obsolete. The military is hamstrung by politics because they made the choice to be there because they didn't like the decisions civilian leadership made.
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I'm not saying we should have napalmed the entire area, but there could have been something done better in that regard. I hear a lot of praise for Obama because of the pakistani raid that killed bin laden, and there was a lot of political fallout for it. i'm not saying that we should do shit like that all the time, but a decisive action like that can often achieve a much greater success than a massive incursion of some other kind, and at a much cheaper cost in life and materiel.
...which made the military action redundant and moot. Why not do that from square one? Could we have won WWII that way? No, because we were fighting a nation-state, not a gang of criminals.