How does this stack up against US involvement in other"good" wars, where the foe is the unambiguously bad?
I.e not a Vietnam style ideologically motivated confrontation.
For example: the US was in World War I for 574 days (declared war on Germany on April 6 1917, and the war ended on November 11 1918), and entered the conflict with the Zimmerman telegram and German submarine attacks as its casus belli.
But the US had been aiding the Allied powers prior to that, and from the German perspective the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the resulting attempt to enlist Mexico to join the war against the US, was a defensive move to stem the flow of supplies from the neutral-but-obviously-biased US to Germany's existing opponents.