Frances Stead Sellers

Last week, I registered to vote. Yaser Esam Hamdi made me do it. Yes, the alleged Taliban fighter — who has been lingering in solitary confinement in a Norfolk naval brig for the past nine months — prompted me to take one more step down the road to becoming a full-fledged American. That’s because I’ve been struck throughout the arcane debate about the legality of Hamodi’s detention that the 22-year-old is trying to reap the benefits of American citizenship without ever having shouldered any of its responsibilities. And while his legal claim may be correct, it distorts the notion of what citizenship once meant. Citizen Hamdi has done none of the things that most Americans do: He hasn’t lived in this country since he was a toddler; he hasn’t gone to school here; he hasn’t worked, shopped, volunteered or carried a passport, let alone paid taxes, served on a jury or voted, to list just a few of the social, economic and political ties that bind most members of a participatory democracy such as the

War is all about taking sides – unless, of course, you can’t because you belong on both sides. That’s the sort of conflict that citizenship laws were intended to avoid. But that’s how Haider Thamir, a citizen of both Iraq and the United States, felt during Operation Iraqi Freedom. “It was like watching your mother and your father having an ugly argument,” the Maryland-based insurance broker says quietly, “and there’s nothing you can do about it.” Whatever else plays into nationality – ethnicity, your birthplace, the place you settle as an adult – what is most revealing is whom you identify with in times of conflict. In this mobile modern world, that core element of national identity is being challenged, as Haider Thamir knows. Born in Baghdad in 1960 to an American mother and an Iraqi father, Thamir understood from childhood the challenges of negotiating a common path between two incongruent ways of life. This spring, 13 years after moving to the United States, when Thamir watched his two countries clash in war, he felt,