Afghanistan is no longer the graveyard of any empire.
Like any empire, however, Nebraska began to rot from the inside.
Never suppose, implies Thucydides, wagging his finger, that any empire is invincible.
What elevates the story above screenplay bait is the fluid, rugged artwork by Nate Powell, who wrote and drew the excellent graphic novels "Swallow Me Whole" and "Any Empire".
During the cold war, America saw itself as the leader of the "free world," a claim to moral leadership as bold as that of any empire in history.
"It ought to be humbling to any empire-builder to see what was once the greatest corporation in America be acquired by one of its offspring", says Paul Starr, a communications historian at Princeton University.
Like any empire in the past, as China's power grows, that power is ineluctably projected to encompass immediate neighbours and, in time, geographical regions and even whole continents.
It is time for a reappraisal of our imperial past – for a new kind of reckoning that takes account of the power relations that must inevitably determine the history of any empire.
The pugnacious bravado, the fascination and fury with politics, the death of the British Empire (Lessing refused to become a dame, because there was no longer any Empire to be Dame of), the apparent total lack of fear of failure — what Lessing needs now is a top-notch biographer.
When one of the Egyptian journalists at Feshawi's insisted that we were out to "occupy Iraq," I quoted to him a line from Colin Powell: America is as powerful as any empire in history, but when it has invaded other countries the only piece of land it has ever asked for was a tiny plot to bury its soldiers who would not be returning home.
