The Military-Industrial-Congressional Cabal, Part Two

"The Japanese and Chinese and others are paying for our wars. How much longer will they continue to do that? I'd submit that they won't continue very much longer at all."

"So we're coming to a fiscal crisis point that will not only stop these two wars, regardless of what we think about them. It will probably stop us being able to do just anything overseas. You will probably see forces beginning to come home from Germany, from Korea and from other places where we have extended them to protect the peripheries of our empire. What I'm talking about, ladies and gentlemen, is the end of the American empire."

Wilkerson then goes onto confirm that the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is really about oil.

"So if there is a strategic reality for our being in that region, if that strategic reality is one that Cheney and Bush, and now apparently some members of the Obama administration, believe essential to the future of our allies -- and yet our fiscal condition is going to compel us to retrench, where does that leave us?"

"Maybe you're happy that we're coming home, maybe you're happy that the military is going to have to confront this fiscal situation? I am because I see a silver lining to this. I see a gradual movement away from being, shall we say, primus inter pares [first among equals] to being pares inter pares [equals among equals]. I see us moving away from being the hegemon of the world which was clearly the decision of the Bush administration when it published its national security strategy --look at section five-- in 2001 and 2002 to being a cooperating, consulting, reasonably powerful and willing to lead when leadership is required, country."

"Wow! Does that sound like America pre-WWII maybe, in a certain way? Does that sound like America living up to what it's supposed to be, a democratic republic?"