Soon the 15th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks will come around; so will that of the Oct. 7, 2001, invasion of Afghanistan prompted by those attacks. But, unlike the former attacks, few in the United States are likely to commemorate the latter with events, let alone with anything like a catchy 10/7, even though the U.S. named it, with smug arrogance, Operation Enduring Freedom.
The 15-year duration makes the Afghanistan War the longest "U.S. foreign war," according to The Washington Post. This makes me think of the controversy over another "15-year war" that Saburo Ienaga made famous with his book, "The Pacific War: 1931-1945." Although the real question was what to call the war that ended with Japan's surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, Ienaga's title suggests the indefinability of a war.
Today few outside Japan may recognize his name, but in the last decades of the last century Ienaga was "Japan's single most famous historian," as scholar Richard Minear noted in 2001 in translating Ienaga's short autobiography, "Japan's Past, Japan's Future: One Historian's Odyssey." Where did his fame come from?
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