The New Roman Empire

"We're walking on thin ice. We are treading the same path taken by the first democratic regime ever created in the Western world, namely the Roman republic. The Roman Republic inadvertently aquired an empire around the world and they then discovered that to maintain, expand, protect this empire they required standing armies. Standing armies are what George Washington warned us against in his farewell address, that they will destroy the structure of government that we tried to create in our Constitution to prevent the rise of an imperial presidency. The single most important article in our Constitution is the one that gives the right to go to war exclusively to the elected respresentatives of the people - to the Congress. Our Congress, in October of 2002, voted in both houses to give this power to a single man, including the use of nuclear weapons if he so chose."

-Chalmers Johnson
CIA, 1967-1973
From the film "Why We Fight"

What worries me isn't so much the alleged big business ties, the oil, or even the lying to the American public. I don't care. What worries me is the notion that we are the New Roman Empire -- and we all know what happened to the old one.