It's been almost a decade and a half since 9/11, but the foreign-policy establishment still cannot admit that continuous American intervention in the Middle East has been a failure.

I recently attended a conference entitled "Hindsight: Reflections on 15 Years of the War on Terror." With a wide range of highly respectable speakers, I naively expected that the panels would conclude that the so-called "global war on terror" had been a misguided project ab initio, that the United States continues to repeat mistakes in its national security policy that promote rather than discourage terrorism—and that the terrorism threat itself has been grossly inflated for largely political and economic reasons.