What's yours? The answer's clear in China, where one's homeland is the place where one's ancestors are buried. It's like that almost everywhere: Roots reach into earth. In a dusty camp in Lebanon an aging Palestinian is still clutching an old rusty key, waiting to reenter a house he hasn't seen in more than 50 years. No other place on Earth will satisfy his longing. He wants that same old lock, that grove of antique olive trees, that same old wooden door.

Americans are different. Most of us -- if asked to name our homeland -- would cite some other country. The word "homeland" holds the notion that we've risen from the soil. But that's not how we got here. We came in steerage, or in slave ships, or crammed into jet planes. For the Scots American trying to play the bagpipe, for the African American whose clothes are trimmed in kente cloth -- in fact, for most Americans -- the homeland doesn't mean America. The homeland is the place our people left to get here.

Our new war may be short and quick, but don't bet on it. History moves swiftly here, but far more slowly elsewhere. As we gird ourselves for battle, we perhaps ought to remember that Bosnia, Chechnya, Jerusalem, Kosovo, Beirut, Afghanistan -- these dark, familiar datelines -- are places where the East and West, or, if you prefer, Islam and Christianity, have been butting heads most bloodily -- over little scraps of homeland and immense and antique grievances - - for many hundred years.