I remember in the early days of our being in Afghanistan, there were a few media pieces reporting that they remembered the last time the British were there, 100 or 150 years ago. The tone was very much that it was somehow surprising the Afghans brought this up again.
Yet Britain and the US are built on national history, myths and memories. The US has a huge national story around independence and the push west into the frontier. The UK has our tales and myths of 1940 and 1066. Scots still remember "the 45" (that's 1745). Why wouldn't Afghanistan or Iraq?
Personally, my eyes were opened quite a while ago when the US dropped one of the largest conventional bombs on some mountain region in Afghanistan where they suspected Taliban leaders to hide out. The next day some guy on Reddit wrote (loosely paraphrased) "Hey, that's were I always travel with my motorbike! Glad I wasn't there when that bomb went down..." and posted a picture of where the bomb hit, with his motorbike in the foreground.
That said, since Irish independence there has been a good degree of desired closeness between the two countries, not least the passport free freedom of movement and voting, which survived the worst of the NI violence. Looking back that can seem surprising. Record numbers of Brits have been applying for Irish passports (a remarkably high number are eligible) since the Brexit vote.
And the worst thing is: from a policy perspective (obviously not arguing about every single US citizen) that's really hard to argue with, given which countries the US has entered into armed conflicts with, which groups of people are most picked upon by politicians, etc.
But for every confict in which the USA is fighting one group of Muslims, it's doing so to protect or ally with another group of Muslims. The Afghan government are Muslims, the elected Iraqi government are Muslims, the victims of IS and the Taliban are overwhelmingly Muslims. Saudi Arabia, the west's biggest ally in the region is Muslim. We are allying with tens of millions of Muslims against groups consisting of thousands of Muslims. The west has far, far more Muslim allies than Muslim enemies.
isn't there though? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-49764305