We Americans have been at war now since Oct. 7, 2001. That was when our military first launched air strikes against the Taliban in Afghanistan in response to al-Qaida’s 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. That’s 22 years and counting. The “war on terror” that began then would forever change what it meant to be an Arab-American here at home, while ending the lives of more than 400,000 civilians — and still counting! — in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In the days after those Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. would enjoy the goodwill and support of countries around the world. Only in March 2003, with our invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, would much of the world begin to regard us as aggressors.
Does that sound like any other armed conflict you’ve heard about recently? What it brings to my mind is, of course, Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, terror assault by the Islamic militant group Hamas on its border areas, which my country and much of the rest of the world roundly condemned.
