We have not done a very good job of telling them.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. This is a much more confusing situation than ww2. The West and the MSM seem to want to make themselves the bad people. People are confused and the governments have not done a great job explaining why we are doing what we are doing.

To be fair whenever I have talked to a Canadian ww2 vet and asked why they fought its always been something like
"well we got it in our heads that there was a bad guy named hitler in Europe and someone had to stop him"

the world was a lot simpler back then