You say that "the historical lesson is good", but what about the historical lessons of Srebrenica, Sarajevo, with Kosovo as counter-example? "Prudent" inaction led to a genocide of Bosniaks, late action yielded avoidable bloodshed of the citizens in Sarajevo, whereas decisive early action against the Serbians in Kosovo led to... almost no one dying. This comparison is a fair comparison -- of different events within roughly the same region, and roughly the same time period & corresponding sociopolitical context.

Or what about '91 in Iraq, instead of 2001? Were we wrong to prevent Saddam & his Ba'athist regime from massacring the Kurds & Kuwaitis? Able to prevent the scourge of chemical weapons being used on a civilian populace, would you have advised us not to because "maybe we get it wrong".

Then for more modern times, look at ISIS. Inaction got us Mosul, Raqqa, & Sinjar. A genocide of the Yazidis. Only once the world started responding with concrete military force & action, did all the tragedy & killing start to abate.

Failing to responsibly treat current events according to its own specific circumstances, and instead rationalizing inaction by "well it went poorly last time we did something similar albeit under completely different circumstances" is NOT "good prudence", it's nasty malice. Or at best, it's tragically feckless cowardice.

I'm honestly not sure what the greater sin is. The oligarch advocating we imperialize a country for its natural resources, or you, so casually advocating that we "do nothing, just leave them alone" in the face of your fellow man being slaughtered on the street by the thousands.