It’s not polite to pile on fellow journalists. Since this is not a research paper, I am not going to provide juicy quotes from articles and columns authored by reporters and pundits — some of whom were awarded Pulitzer Prizes — who had promised that we were about to win the Iraq war any day now. Just wait and see. Victory is around the corner!

Those are the same journalists who celebrated our mission of ousting dictators and bringing democracy to and remaking the Greater Middle East, and who told us how having elections there would turn Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Libya into functioning liberal, stable and peaceful republics. They also tried to get us involved in the civil war in Syria, this time without any success. Thank God (or those voters who elected Obama and Trump) for small mercies.

And let us not forget the ecstasy that took hold of those reporting from Tahrir Square in Cairo during the so-called Arab Spring, who predicted that all those English-speaking and internet-using students were going to establish a Jeffersonian democracy on the Nile. Just like what happened on the shores of the Euphrates or in the West Bank.