World history books are full of stories about small, selfish megalomaniacs who were able to convince themselves that their ugliest conduct was justified for some higher good.

In those stories, the delusional power freak typically regards himself as almost a father figure who knows what's best for the rest of the world whether the rest of the world wants it or not.

In 1997, a group of those delusional megalomaniacs met with a purpose of organizing a neo-con nut cabal called the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The goal of the group was empire building. Ground zero for that empire-building goal was the Middle East—specifically Iraq. Members of that secretive creepy group are the usual suspects: Dick Cheney, Steve Forbes, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and a dozen other misguided political neurotics who have a personal hero list that no doubt includes Napoleon Bonaparte and Julius Caesar. The PNAC has flourished for 11 years now.

There is a common theme in stories about empire building. It is that the last chapter of the story is always about disaster. There are few living scholars in the world who have analyzed empire building more thoroughly than Howard Zinn and Chalmers Johnson. In interviews with them, I learned about the dangers of building empires. Both Zinn and Chalmers agree that no country can maintain the bloated expansive level of the militarism that is required for the process. The Soviet, Roman and Ottoman Empires all failed because they squandered too many resources on a gargantuan military complex. They were not the kind of military structures designed to protect citizens from aggression at home. Instead, it was a military designed to expand and protect monied commercial interests of the empire.

And here is where it gets ugly. According to Chalmers Johnson, in order for that type of a military complex to grow strong enough to serve an expanded empire, democracy must give way. Intelligence organizations operate without traditional democratic checks and balances. Military leadership cannot be held in check even by elected government. Media becomes dysfunctional to the point that it is an extension of empire policy rather than an objective watchdog.

But a problem that even those Steve Forbes and Dick Cheney types conveniently overlooked is that there has never in the history of mankind been a culture that could afford empire building. The end result is not only moral bankruptcy but economic bankruptcy as well.

Afghanistan alone finally bankrupted the Soviet Empire and Great Britain barely saved itself from total ruin by the time it relinquished the Middle East and India.

Eleven years after that first meeting, Cheney delivered his promise to the PNAC. He finished his $1 billion Halliburton-built embassy in America's new desert empire. In a sense, that embassy is an arrogant admission that we were never in the desert to liberate Iraqis or to protect America from terrorism. The simple truth is we are there to make the same mistakes that every other empire has made before us. That $1 billion embassy is a testament to the fact that all those seedy characters that make up the PNAC are incapable of learning from history.