"other countries have interior lives"

Alex Pareene doesn't hold back -- America is the first true "Psychopath Nation":

"But something grimmer has to explain the actions of the people responsible for devising and carrying out our foreign policy—in Congress, in dubiously funded think tanks, at the Pentagon, and on the National Security Council. It is not simple hypocrisy to talk of peace and democracy while knocking over democratically elected governments and propping up friendly authoritarian states. It is a deeper inability to conceive of people in other countries as fully real. Without a rival superpower to help us justify our actions, the way we conduct business abroad has gone from 'ironic,' to use Niebuhr’s diagnosis, to psychopathic. America is perhaps the first psychopath nation: It does not act as if it has considered that other countries have interior lives.

It is perhaps natural for an imperial state to behave as if other countries do not have the right to respond to its provocations, but the United States takes this absurd notion one step further: Our leaders not only fail to consider how other state actors might respond; they seem to be unable to predict how other state actors might respond."

I'm not in the mood for Google-fu, but I remember way back during the initial invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan when a Bush spokeswoman on CNN was congratulating her boss for recognizing "Hey, Iraqis and Afghans have children just like we do!"

I'll never forget the look of completely unearned accomplishment on her smug, ugly face.  We bomb the shit out of people whose lives were already unimaginably miserable but don't forget, we simultaneously recognize them as humans too!  Even the dead babies!