I often stopped by this little sandwich shop on Euclid Avenue, just north of the University of California campus, when I studied at the Graduate Theological Union in the early 2000s. You could get a sandwich, a bag of chips and a can of pop for, like, $5.25. The owner made the sandwiches himself. He didn’t talk a lot, but I think he was from the Philippines. He made the best egg salad sandwich I’ve ever had. 

On the morning of March 18, 2003, I glanced over at a news rack outside his store. I froze. 

The headline included “48 Hours.” I looked through the dirty glass to read the first few graphs of the story. “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours,” President George W. Bush said during a televised address to the nation the night before. “Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict.” 

From within the Berkeley bubble at least, it seemed idiotic. Hussein wasn’t going to leave Iraq. “Surely,” I thought, “the president must be negotiating. It must be a bluff.” 

It was not. 

I thought of Mr. Bush on Saturday when President Donald Trump gave Iran 48 hours to open the Strait of Hormuz. If they did not, he said, the United States would “obliterate” Iran’s power plants. In turn, Iran threatened the region’s desalination infrastructure. 

Then on Monday, before the 48 hours had expired, Mr. Trump announced his administration had been in productive talks with unnamed Iranian leaders. The two nations would try to work something out, Mr. Trump said, in the next five days. Yesterday, with the strait still closed, he extended the deadline another week. 

Since the war began nearly four weeks ago, I have found myself checking headlines hourly. I brace for bad news, but hope for something good. By “good” I mean some indication that this war is ending, that people aren’t dying, that the economy is stabilizing. But even this week, with the exchange of information between the warring nations that could loosely be called “negotiations,” there is no end in sight to this conflict.  

Like others, I question the justification of the combined Israeli and U.S. strike of Iran, which killed nearly 40 of the nation’s top officials, including its supreme leader. Beyond the immediate destruction and loss of human life, such aggressive military action has ripple effects that are impossible to calculate. Regrettably, U.S. presidents have been taking such actions for years without seeking congressional approval. Maintaining the element of surprise is a poor reason to drag the entire world into economic upheaval, not to mention the death of untold civilians. 

The editors of America have expressed skepticism over whether this war should have begun in the first place. But now that it has, what I keep wondering is how and when it will end. I pray that, somehow, the lives of those who live in these Middle Eastern countries will be better, not worse, when the bombs stop falling. 

I am among those who would like to see the Iranian regime overthrown, however unlikely that outcome may be. Since it began in 1979, this regime has engaged in mass executions, killed as many as 30,000 protestors in January and hanged three young men just last week. The United Nations has found that Iran is guilty of the systematic suppression of women. Iran has a long history of supporting groups that the U.S. government describes as terrorists, like Hamas and Hezbollah, and is known for its slogan “Death to Israel.” With that track record, it is sobering to read reports that Iran has weapons-grade or close to weapons-grade enriched uranium, which would be used in nuclear bombs.

One of my best friends in grad school married an Iranian woman before we graduated. Their traditional Persian wedding may be the most beautiful celebration I’ve ever attended. But it wasn’t without a lingering sadness. She and her family fled to the United States as political refugees when she was still a child. Years later, she still feared for her life. 

I met many who fled for their lives after the United States invaded Iraq. In 2008, I traveled to Syria and Lebanon with Catholic Relief Services and interviewed dozens of Iraqi refugees. In Aleppo, I met Bishop Antoine Aldo, a Jesuit who leads the Chaldean eparchy there. He told me Iraq was not prepared for the democracy the United States had tried to foist upon it. He didn’t think it would work because, culturally, the people were not ready.  

But Iran’s history with democracy is different, and some maintain the country’s Zoroastrian roots prepared its people for representative government. Today, it is clear from Iranians’ long advocacy for free elections that a democratic form of government would not be an imposition. Perhaps it is true, as The Atlantic reported before the war began, that conditions favor a successful revolution.

That’s really what I want to read about when I check my phone: The revolution is overcoming the tyrannical regime that persecuted so many people, some of whom I met. I want the strait to be opened so that countries who had nothing to do with this war can stop paying a steep price for it. And I want to read that the violence has, at last, ended. 

I want people to go about their lives and enjoy a delicious sandwich without worrying that a bomb or a drone is about to kill them.

J.D. Long García is a senior editor at Americaand co-author of Clericalism: The Institutional Dimension of the Catholic Sexual Abuse Crisis.