Indeed, that might explain the philosophy of "we destroy, you rebuild as best you can", so characteristic of America's interventions. The big kid can climb aboard his supersonic plane and, almost like pushing the buttons on a fancy video-game, make flashes and puffs of smoke rise from tiny structures far below with even tinier, ant-like dots running in all directions. Some Americans are capable of mustering that much interest. Besides, you get to be called a hero for doing that.

The immense arrogance of a term like "regime change" is lost on America. Much of the world, in American eyes, just resembles beat-up, ugly ghettos run by gangs that can't speak English, anyway. Why would anyone complain if we blew some of them up? This is the world as seen by American suburbanites cruising along in shiny, four-ton SUVs from "gated communities" to gated corporate headquarters, showing no interest in the scenes that rush by between one island of security and another. All that "stuff" in between might just as well be China or Egypt or Iraq.

America is a country that has almost no experience of war, except during the Civil War, and that was a very long time ago and was pretty much limited to one region of the country. America has never seen a city reduced to the rubble of Berlin or Tokyo after World War II, peopled by phantoms flitting about desperate to find any scrap of something useful or edible.