* The author wishes to thank Mark Selden, Osama Khalil and the anonymous reviewer.

¹ Michael Ignatieff, “The Duty to Protect Still Urgent,” New York Times, September 13, 2013. See also Ignatieff, “With Syria, Diplomacy Needs Force,” New York Times, February 25, 2014.

² For a history of distortions that often accompany the politicization of the past and result from the ingrained prejudices of historians, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

³ Randolph S. Bourne, War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915-1919, edited and with an introduction, by Carl Resek (Indianapolis, Hacket Publishing, 1964).

⁴ Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1967). Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Cold War liberal and Kennedy advisor was another main target of Chomsky's critique.

⁵ Noam Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West (London: Verso, 1999).

⁶ Strobe Talbott, ‘Birth of the Global Nation’, Time, 20 July 1992; John Laughland, Travesty: The Trial of Slobodan Milosevic and Corruption of International Justice (London: Pluto, 2007), 39.

⁷ See e.g. Patrick Tyler, “U.S. Strategy Plan Calls for Insuring No Rivals Develop,” New York Times, March 8, 1992; US Department of Defense, “Defense Planning Guidance, FY 1994-1999,” February 18, 1992; Noam Chomsky, World Orders Old and New (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 7; John Stockwell, The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order (Boston: South End Press, 1991).

⁸ Taylor B. Sebolt, Humanitarian Military Intervention: The Conditions for Successes and Failure (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 49; Cristina Gabriela Badescu, Humanitarian Intervention and the R2P: Security and Human Rights (New York: Routeledge, 2011).

⁹ “The Responsibility to Protect,” Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (Ottawa: International Development Research Center, 2001), VII, 3.

¹⁰ Mary Kaldor, “A Decade of the ‘War on Terror and the Responsibility to Protect: The Global Debate About Military Intervention,” in Global Civil Society 2012: Ten Years of Critical Reflection(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Michael Mandel, How America Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity (London: Pluto Press, 2004); Nick Turse, The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 13.

¹¹ “The Responsibility to Protect,” Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, VII, 19, 29, 31, 39.

¹² Antony Fenton, “Finally a Real Debate on R2P” Global Research July 26, 2009. For examples of how Cold War interventions produced failed states, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Intervention and the Making of Our Time (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

¹³ In Introduction, Critical Perspectives on the Responsibility to Protect: Interrogating Theory and Practice, ed. Philip Cunliffe (New York: Routeledge, 2011); Ramesh Thakur, The UN, Peace and Security: From Collective Security to the Responsibility to Protect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 250-251.

¹⁴ Michael Ignatieff, ‘How to Save the Syrians,” New York Review of Books blog, September 13, 2013; Samantha Power, “Statement by Ambassador Samantha Power, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, U.S. Mission to the United Nations,” New York, NY, September 11, 2013.

¹⁵ See Seymour M. Hersh, “The Red Line and the Rat Line: Seymour Hersh on Obama, Erdogen and the Syrian rebels,” London Review of Books, April 17, 2014; D. Gareth Porter, “In Search of Truth: U.N. Probe Chief Doubtful on Syria Sarin Exposure Claims,” May 7, 2014, Counterpunch, www.counterpunch.org.

¹⁶ D. Gareth Porter, “Yes, the Pentagon Did Want to Hit Iran,” The Asia Times, May 7, 2008; Douglas Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2009).

¹⁷ Laura Smith-Spark and Saad Abedine, “Syrian Rebel Fighters Guilty of Serious Abuses Says human Rights Watch,” CNN, October 11, 2012. In one incident, the FSA attacked an Allawite village near Latekia, killing 190.

¹⁸ Eric Schmitt, “CIA Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition,” New York Times, June 21, 2012.

¹⁹ Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).

²⁰ Jeremy Kuzmarov, ““You Have to Not Mind Killing Innocents:” American COIN operations in Afghanistan and the Violence of Empire,” in A People's History of Counterinsurgency, ed. Hannah Gurman (New York: The New Press, 2013), 186-187; Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, The Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014).

²¹ See Robert Jay Lifton, Home From War: Vietnam Veterans Neither Victims Nor Executioners (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973); Winter Soldier (Millarium Zero and Winterfilm in Association with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, 1972); Chris Hedges, War is a Force That Gives us Meaning (New York: Anchor Books, 2003).

²² Lifton, Home From War, 109.

²³ Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of the American Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002); William Blum, Killing Hope: CIA and US Military Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998); John Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). On deception, see Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011).

²⁴ Michael Ignatieff, The Warriors’ Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997). See also Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1995).

²⁵ Ignatieff, The Warriors’ Honor, 94.

²⁶ Michael Ignatieff, “The American Empire: The Burden,” New York Review of Books, January 5, 2003.

²⁷ For a critical view of Ignatieff's career, see Derrick O’Keefe, Michael Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil? (London: Verso, 2011); Neda Atanasoski, Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and Jeanne Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

²⁸ See Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992). On Ignatieff's support for torture in the War on Terror, see his book, The Lesser Evil: Politics and Ethics in an Age of Terror (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2004).

²⁹ On Somalia, see Mohammed Diriye Abdullahi, “In the Name of the Cold War: How the West Aided and Abetted the Barre Dictatorship of Somalia,” in Genocide, War Crimes, and the West: History and Complicity, ed. Adam Jones (London: Zed Books, 2004), 241-60, and on the Black Hawk Down fiasco and war crimes, Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999), 10; Alex de Waal, “US War Crimes in Somalia,” New Left Review, July-August, 1998; Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi, Fiasco in Somalia: U.S.-U.N. Intervention (Pretoria: Africa Institute of South Africa, 1995); Seybolt, Humanitarian Military Intervention, 59. The numbers killed were probably more than the lives saved in famine relief operations. Thousands more were wounded.

³⁰ David N. Gibbs, “Realpolitick and Humanitarian Intervention: The Case of Somalia,” International Politics, March 2000.

³¹ Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Viking, 2000). See as a counterpart, David Rieff, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West (New York: Touchstone, 1996); Roy Gutman, A Witness to Genocide (New York: Element Books, 1993).

³² David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009).

³³ Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 164; Hedges, War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, 70; John R. Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qaida, and the Rise of Global Jihad (Zenith Press, 2007). Tony Blair's former Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher noted: “For nearly a decade the US helped Islamist insurgents linked to Chechnya, Iran and Saudi Arabia destabilize former Yugoslavia.”

³⁴ Peter Dale Scott, “Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington's Ongoing Collusion with Terrorists,” The Asia- Pacific Journal, Vol. 9, Issue 31, August 2011; Gibbs, First Do No Harm, 67, 111, 115, 129; Schindler, Unholy Terror; Peter Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Private Military Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 126; Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide, foreword by Noam Chomsky (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010).

³⁵ Robert Fisk, “Serbs Murdered by the Hundred since ‘Liberation,’“ The Independent, November 24, 1999; Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, ed. Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 203.

³⁶ Gibbs, First Do No Harm; Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011); Paul Lewis, “Report IDs Hashim Thaci as Big Fish in Organized Crime,” Guardian, January 24, 2001; Peter Klebnikov, “Heroin Heroes,” Mother Jones, January/February 2000; Laughland, Travesty, 21.

³⁷ Perry Anderson, “American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers,” New Left Review, September/October 2013.

³⁸ For a recent example, see Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (New York: Penguin, 2004). On Mill, see Mark Tunick, “Tolerant Imperialism: John Stuart Mill's Defense of British Rule in India,” Review of Politics 68 (2006), 586-611; and Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism.

³⁹ William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 50^th anniversary edition (New York: The New Press, 2009).

⁴⁰ Eg. Fred Cook, The Warfare State, foreword by Bertrand Russell (New York: McMillan, 1962); Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War (New York: McGraw Hill, 1970); Peter Dale Scott, The War Conspiracy (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1972); Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, with Leonard P. Adams II and Cathleen B. Read (New York: Harper, & Row, 1972).

⁴¹ Carl Oglesby and Richard Shaull, Containment and Change (New York: McMillan, 1967); “The New Left and Empire” in David Barber, A Hard Rain Fell: SDS and Why it Failed (University of Mississippi Press, 2008).

⁴² Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life under an Air War, rev. ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012).

⁴³ James Peck, Ideal Illusions: How the US Government Coopted Human Rights (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010). See also Noam Chomsky, “Visions of Righteousness,” in The Vietnam War in American Culture, ed. John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). The shift in the Carter administration's rhetoric and priorities in the last two years and influence of neoconservative lobbies in shaping this shift is skillfully detailed in Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis: The Committee on the Present Danger and the Politics of Containment (Boston: South End Press, 1983).

⁴⁴ John L. Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford, 1997). On the transformation of Jewish intellectuals who “made it” in America from liberals to neoconservatives, see Benjamin Balint, Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine that Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right (New York: Public Affairs, 2010). The New Left was also accused, without merit, of being anti-Semitic after people like Daniel Berrigan and Noam Chomsky began voicing criticism of Israeli policies. See Noam Chomsky, “The Peace Movement and the Middle East,” In Middle East Illusions (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).

⁴⁵ Perry Anderson, “American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers,” New Left Review, September-October 2013.

⁴⁶ C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956); Alexander Cockburn, A Colossal Wreck (London: Verso, 2013), 348.

⁴⁷ Peck, Ideal Illusions.

⁴⁸ See Noam Chomsky, Failed States: the Abuse of Power and Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006. On the carcerial state, see Sasha Abramsky, American Furies: Crime, Punishment and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008).

⁴⁹ Black intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson had long made the connection. See Noam Chomsky, The Year 501: The Conquest Continues (Boston: South End Press, 1993); James W. Gibson, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1994); Michael Moore, Bowling for Columbine (United Artists, 2002) which points out that the Columbine killings and rise of right wing militia movements coincided with the bombing of Kosovo and other violent foreign policies in the 1990s.

⁵⁰ Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1991); Cold War Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism, ed. Ellen Schrecker (New York: The New Press, 2004).

⁵¹ Thomas L. Friedman, “A Manifesto for the Fast World,” New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999, 65. For a critique of Friedman, see Belen Fernandez, The Imperial Messenger: Thomas L. Friedman at Work (London: Verso, 2011).

⁵² Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Jean Bethke Elshtain ed. Just War Theory (New York: NYU Press, 1991). For an intellectual statement in support of the War on Terror, see “What We’re Fighting For” February 2002.

⁵³ Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Throughout History (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993); Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy” The Atlantic, December 1994; Imperial Grunts: On the Ground with the American Military, from Mongolia, to the Philippines to Iraq and Beyond (New York: Vintage, 2006). For insightful analysis of Kaplan's work and its impact, see Atanasoski, Humanitarian Violence, 66-67.

⁵⁴ Samantha Power, “How to Kill a Country: Turning a Breadbasket into a Basket case in Ten Easy Steps - The Robert Mugabe Way,” The Atlantic, December 1, 2003 which blamed “limited western intervention” for contributing to the country's catastrophe. She indicts Robert Mugabe for turning a breadbasket into a basket-case, though failed to discuss the deep social divisions bred by colonial rule that contributed to the post-colonial violence under Mugabe, the effect of Western sanctions that she herself championed and wide inequalities that resulted in support for Mugabe's land reform and seizure policies among a considerable percentage of the population. For more sophisticated analysis, see Mahmood Mamdani, “Lessons of Zimbabwe” London Review of Books (December 2008).

⁵⁵ Samantha Power, “A Problem From Hell:” America in the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

⁵⁶ Celestine Bohlen, “On a Mission to Shine a Spotlight on Genocide,” New York Times, February 5, 2003, E1; Stephen Wertheim, “A Solution From Hell: The United States and the Rise of Humanitarian Interventionism, 1991-2003,” Journal of Genocide Research, 12 (304); September-December 2010, 163. Even publications on the progressive-left sang its praises and the book is often used in college courses today.

⁵⁷ Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Still Crusading, but Now on the Inside,” New York Times, March 29, 2011.

⁵⁸ See Mahmood Mamdani, “Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish,” in Critical Perspectives on the Responsibility to Protect, ed. Cunliffe, 125-139; Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide.

⁵⁹ See e.g. Hans Morgenthau et al. Politics among Nations, rev ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2005); John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2014); Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York: Pantheon, 1973).

⁶⁰ See Walter Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2013); Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492-Present (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2001).

⁶¹ See Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934, rev ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995).

⁶² Donald Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Robert L. Daniel, “The Armenian Question and American Turkish Relations, 1914-1927,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 46, 2 (September 1959), 254; Guenter Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005), 116; Herbert Adams Gibbon, “Armenia in the World War,” (Armenian Committee Opposed to the Lausanne Treaty, 1926). Col. John Price Jackson said that “had Armenian fighting men not done their duty so heroically at a critical place and time, the war most likely would have lasted another year, with the result that our losses in men and money would have been twice greater.” Turkish Gen. Ihsan Pasha said: “Had it not been for the Armenians, we would have conquered the Caucuses.” The Armenians were also credited with assisting British Gen. Edmund Allenby's campaigns in Palestine.

⁶³ Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey, 251. See also Raymond Kevorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Michael M. Gunter, ‘What is Genocide? The Armenian Case,” Middle East Quarterly (Winter 2013), 37-46; Gunter, Armenian History and the Question of Genocide (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2011); A Question of Genocide: Armenians and the Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Muge Goçek and Norman M. Naimark (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9. There is no scholarly consensus that the term genocide is appropriate, and no premeditated plan has ever been found in archives. Turkish documents, historian Bernard Lewis noted “prove an intent to banish but not to exterminate.”

⁶⁴ Gunter, Armenian History and the Question of Genocide, 15-16.

⁶⁵ Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey, 116.

⁶⁶ Henry Morgenthau, Ambassad or Morgenthau's Story (New York: Doubleday, 1918); Heath W. Lowry, The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (Istanbul: ISIS Press, 1990), 2. Morgenthau was a real estate broker who served as finance committee chairman for Wilson's 1912 presidential campaign. His book was widely publicized, sold well and there were even plans to turn it into a Hollywood movie. For more on Morgenthau, see Henry Morgenthau, with French Strother, All in a Lifetime (New York: Doubleday, 1922).

⁶⁷ Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 374. Historians reviewing the evidence have determined that Morgenthau was lying. As Fleming points out, in the early months of the war, Germany was trying to convince the United States that hostilities had been forced on it. Wagenheim would have never thus boasted to an American official that precisely the opposite was true. State Department files show no report from Morgenthau of his conversation with Wagenheim who conveniently died in 1915. If such an exchange had taken place, Morgenthau should have (and would have) instantly informed the government.

⁶⁸ Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, 168, 251; Lowry, The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story; Lewy, The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey, 140, 141. Morgenthau's book coincided with British propaganda written by Arnold Toynbee and Lord James Bryce, who was also responsible for spreading stories about German rapes in Belgium. Lowry and Lewy scrutinized Morgenthau's diaries and found documents pointing to the hidden motives underlying the books’ publication. Ronald Grigor Suny, Charles Tilly professor of political science at the University of Michigan attempts to rehabilitate Morgenthau's reputation without having consulted his papers.

⁶⁹ “Morgenthau for Turkish Mandate: Launches Appeal for US to Take Over Constantinople, Armenia and Anatolia: Thinks Allies Deserve It: Britain Would Grant Equal Rights to Strait of Gibraltar,” New York Times, October 18, 1919, 1; Henry Morgenthau, “Mandates or War? World peace Held to be Menaced Unless the United States Assumes Control of the Sultan's Former Dominions,” New York Times, November 9, 1919, SM1. Morgenthau characterized the Turks as “the habitual criminal of history” ruling over the “most revolting tyranny that history has ever known” and wrote that “we cannot hope sanely for peace unless America reestablishes at Constantinople a center from which democratic principles shall radiate and illuminate that dark region of the world.”

⁷⁰ Lowry, The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau's Story, 62, 63; Lord Bryce quoted in Gunter, Armenian History and the Question of Genocide, 4. See also George A. Schreiner, “Armenia's Red Caravan of Sorrow” in From Berlin to Baghdad: Behind the Scenes in the Near East (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1918), 183-214; George A. Schreiner, The Craft Sinister: A Diplomatico-Political History of the Great War and Its Causes (G. Albert Gayer, 1920), 110-136. Schreiner wrote a letter to Morgenthau stating: “In the interest of truth, you saw little of the cruelty you fasten upon the Turks. Besides that, you have killed more Armenians than ever lived in the districts of the uprisings. The fate of those people was sad enough without having to be exaggerated as you have done. I have probably seen more of the Armenian affair than all Armenian attaches of the American embassy together…If we are to take for granted that we of the West are saints, then no Turk is any good…. Of diplomatic events on the Bosphorus, more will be heard as soon as I can get my notes and documents…Being a newspaper man instead of a diplomat, I must be careful in what I say.”

⁷¹ Examples that come to mind include the Hmong in Laos, Miskito Indians in Nicaragua, Tibetans and Kurds. With the Armenians there was little moral outcry when the Kemalist state carried out a renewed wave of pogroms in the mid 1920s because by that point the US had re-established strong diplomatic relations with Ankara. See Bloxham, The Great Game of Genocide; Roger Trask, The United States Response to Turkish Nationalism and Reform, 1914-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971).

⁷² Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I, 307; Adam Hochschild, To End all Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2011); Dalton Trumbo, Johnny Got His Gun, rev ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1970).

⁷³ For refutation of this charge, see Fleming, The Illusion of Victory, 494-95. On government propaganda in World War I, see Stewart Halsey Ross, Propaganda for War: How the United States Was Conditioned to Fight the Great War of 1914-1918 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996).

⁷⁴ See David Schmitz, Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right Wing Dictatorship, 1921-1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War (New York: Times Books 2013); Antony Sutton, Wall Street and Hitler (New York: GSG & Associates, 1976).

⁷⁵ See Norman G. Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2003). Finkelstein also details the exploitation of Jewish suffering by Jewish organizations demanding victim compensation, whose leaders fleeced the survivors.

⁷⁶ See Hun Joon Kim, The Massacres at Mt. Halla: Sixty years of Truth Seeking in South Korea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 16; Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol II: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950, rev ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 250-259. The Truth commission found the South Korean military and paramilitary youth gangs responsible for 88 percent of atrocities, with at least 30,000 killed. Tens of thousands more were killed after constabulary regiments in Yeosu mutinied, refusing orders to “murder the people of Cheju- do fighting against imperialist policy.”

⁷⁷ See John Roosa, Pretext for Mass Murder (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns (Stanford University Press, 2008); George McT. Kahin and Audrey Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (New York: New Press, 1995); Bradley R. Simpson, Economists with Guns: Authoritarian Development and U.S.- Indonesian Relations, 1960-1968 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008); Wayne Madsen, The Manufacturing of a President: The CIAs Insertion of Barrack Obama Jr. Into the White House (self-published, 2012); Kathy Kadane, “Ex-Agents Say CIA Compiled Death Lists for Indonesia, San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1990; Peter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno,” Pacific Affairs, 58 (Summer 1985). Based on confidential sources, Madsen posits that Soetoro, a Lieutenant-Colonel was recalled from a CIA-Pentagon sponsored program at the University of Hawaii prior to Suharto's coup and later participated in a bloody crackdown on a secessionist movement in West Papua. Rather than being a hippie ignorant of Suharto's crimes as Obama depicts it in his memoir, Obama's mother Ann Dunham allegedly worked for the CIA gathering political information on Javanese villagers under the Operation PROSYMS. These allegations appear to have merit, though are impossible to corroborate unless more information comes to light. The book proves at the very least that Obama lied in his memoir about his mother's knowledge of the genocide, as it was reported in the mainstream media at the time, favorably.

⁷⁸ CIA Director of Intelligence, “Indonesia: Prospects for Economic Stability,” Papers of LBJ, NSF, Country File, July 1968, box 249, LBJ Library, Austin Texas. See also Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 182; Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Political Economy of Human Rights: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 154, 155.

⁷⁹ Blum, Killing Hope, 197, 198. Obama revived training of units responsible for human rights crimes as part of his “tilt to Asia” strategy.

⁸⁰ See Greg Grandin, Empire's Workshop: The U.S., Latin America and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006); Chase Mader, “Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights,” Counterpunch, June 6, 2013. On Gramajo's exploits, see Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide: The United States in Latin America and the Struggle for Peace (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1987).

⁸¹ Nick Turse, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013). See also Bernd Greiner, War without Fronts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Deborah Nelson, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes (New York: Basic Books, 2008). Earlier works by anti-war activists also chronicled the wide scale of atrocity. See eg. Edward S. Herman, Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1970) and it is also detailed in the memoirs of soldiers.

⁸² Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, rev ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), 183; Bernard Fall, Last Reflections on a War (New York: Doubleday, 1967); James W. Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 225.

⁸³ Ben Kiernan and Taylor Owen, “Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on US Air War,” Japan Focus, May 12, 2007; Kimmo Kiljunen ed. Kampuchea: Decade of Genocide: Report of the Finish Inquiry Commission (London: Zed Books, 1984); Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (Boston: South End Press, 1979); Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, rev ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

⁸⁴ Power, “A Problem From Hell,” 148, 149.A professor in the school of Oriental studies at the University of London who had co-written important studies of US intervention in Cambodia and Indonesia, Caldwell was probably murdered by Khmer Rouge cadres who didn’t want the story of their abuses getting out to the international left. It remains in question if Caldwell remained an apologist for the Khmer Rouge, or as his brother suggests, he had begun to revise his original enthusiasm for the revolution they had led. Even if he was an unreconstructed Maoist, why is Power bent on referring to Caldwell is an “ideologue” and not neo-Reaganites for example who willfully sponsored genocidal or quasi-genocidal regimes promoting a market fundamentalist ideology and in many cases remain proud of doing so?

⁸⁵ Clark, The Fire This Time, 68; Barton Gellman, “US Bombs Missed 70% of the Time,” Washington Post, March 16, 1991, A1; Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2006).

⁸⁶ See the volume Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War, ed. Anthony Arnove (Boston: South End Press 2003).

⁸⁷ Mader, “Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights.”

⁸⁸ For deconstruction of this myth and discussion of its political ramifications, see Robin Philpot, Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa: From Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2013).

⁸⁹ Philip Gourevitch, ‘We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow You Will be Killed:’ Stories from Rwanda (New York: Harper, 1998). Gourevitch was married to a top State Department staffer and was a good friend of Kagame.

⁹⁰ Hazel Cameron, Britain's Hidden Role in the Rwandan Genocide: the Cat's Paw (London: Routeledge, 2013), 126; Christopher Black, “The Dallaire Genocide Fax: A Fabrication,” December 7, 2005. The source of the information on this alleged extermination plot, Abubakar Turatsinze, “AKA” Jean Pierre, was a defector from Habyarimana's MRND party of dubious reliability. According to another study by Christian Davenport and Allen Stamm, census figures show there were only 600,000 Tutsi in the whole country and at least 300,000 are said to have survived. Power's numbers are thus inflated. Michael McGehee, “New York Times Coverage of the 20^th Anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide,” New York Times Examiner, February 4, 2014.

⁹¹ See Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and Genocide in Rwanda (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001).

⁹² Cameron, Britain's Hidden Role in the Rwanda Genocide, 80; Herman and Peterson, The Politics of Genocide; Wayne Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999 (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1999); Ellen Ray, “US Military and Corporate Recolonization of the Congo,” Covert Action Quarterly (Spring-Summer 2000); Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished: A US-UN Saga (New York: Random House, 1999), 129-141.According to Boutros-Ghali, the US is “100 percent responsible for the genocide.” On CIA support for Habyarimana, see Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation Building in the American Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), ch. 8.

⁹³ Marie Beatrice Umutesi, Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Madsen, Genocide and Covert Operations in Africa, 1993-1999); Gérard Prunier, Africa's World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Prunier had the integrity to admit that he promoted an overly romanticized view of the RPF in his first book (The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide. Columbia University Press, 1997).

⁹⁴ See Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009).

⁹⁵ Samantha Power, “Dying in Darfur: Can the Ethnic Cleansing in Sudan be Stopped?” New Yorker, August 30, 2004. For critical analysis of the Save Darfur movement, see Mahmood Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (New York: Pantheon, 2009). Power also championed covert intervention in Zimbabwe following Robert Mugabe's intervention in the Congo war. However, she did not call for similar sanctions against Rwanda or Uganda who caused the war and looted the country's mineral wealth far more systematically (both regimes also repressed domestic dissent).

⁹⁶ See Adam Branch, Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Mamdani, “Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish?” In Critical Perspectives on the Responsibility to Protect, ed. Cunliffe, 130-131. On domestic repression and record numbers of journalists imprisoned under Museveni, see Olive Kobusingye, The Correct Line? Uganda Under Museveni (New York: Authorhouse, 2010). For the double-standards of US rhetoric and policy in sub-Saharan Africa, see also Steven Fake and Kevin Funk, The Scramble for Africa: Darfur - Intervention and the US (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2008).

⁹⁷ See Mark Mazetti, The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army and a War at the Ends of the Earth (New York: Penguin, 2013), 148-149; Scahill, Dirty Wars, 127, 128; Keith Harmon Snow, “State Terror in Ethiopia,” Z Magazine, June 1, 2004.

⁹⁸ Tom Hayden, “Samantha Power Goes to War,” The Nation, March 30, 2011.

⁹⁹ Samantha Power, “Our War on Terror,” New York Times, July 29, 2007.

¹⁰⁰ For a critical assessment of the army counterinsurgency manual that draws on historical parallels, see Hearts and Minds: A People's History of Counterinsurgency, ed. Hannah Gurman (New York: The New Press, 2013).

¹⁰¹ L. Michael Hager, “Double Standards? Panel Cites US Human Rights Treaty Breaks,” Truthout, March 31, 2014; Nick Turse, “The Terror Diaspora: The U.S. Military and the Unraveling of Africa,” June 18, 2013. The brutality of the Nigerian military, financed and trained for years by the US, has been key to the growing extremism of Boko Haram little considered in media discussion following the schoolgirl kidnapping. The crisis there demands a public commitment to eradicating poverty and corruption underlying the alienation of Muslim youth, not further militarization. See Horace Campbell, “The Menace of Boko Haram and Fundamentalism in Nigeria,” May 30, 2014.

¹⁰² Colum Lynch, “Can Samantha Power Wage a War on Atrocities in Central African Republic,” Foreign Policy, December 19, 2013; Nick Turse, “Washington's Back-to-the-Future Military Policies in Africa: America's New Model for Expeditionary Warfare,” March 13, 2014.

¹⁰³ Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Still Crusading, but Now on the Inside,” New York Times, March 29, 2011. On the actual realities of Libya, see Maximilan Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO's War on Libya and Africa (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2012); The Illegal War on Libya, ed. Cynthia McKinney (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2012).

¹⁰⁴ Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte; The Illegal War on Libya, ed. Cynthia McKinney; Peter Dale Scott, “Bosnia, Kosovo, and Now Libya: The Human Costs of Washington's Ongoing Collusion with Terrorists,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 9, Issue 31, August 2011; Patrick Cockburn, “Lawlessness and Ruin in Libya,” September 5, 2013, Counterpunch.

¹⁰⁵ Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte; The Illegal War on Libya, ed. McKinney; C.J. Chivers, “In Strikes on Libya by NATO, an Unspoken Civilian Toll,” New York Times, December 17, 2011.

¹⁰⁶ See Ruth First, Libya: The Elusive Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1974); Geoff Simmons, Libya and the West: From Independence to Lockerbie (London: I.B. Taurus, 2003); Blum, Killing Hope, 283. Libyan life expectancy increased under Qaddafi from 54 to 71.

¹⁰⁷ Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott and Jane Hunter, The Iran Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 215. On the 1986 bombing and its consequences, see Seymour Hersh, “Target Qaddafi,” New York Times Magazine, February 22, 1987; Noam Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World, rev ed. (Boston: South End Press, 2002), 92.

¹⁰⁸ Forte, Slouching Towards Sirte; Horace Campbell, Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012); Peter Dale Scott, “American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 9, Issue 18, May 2, 2011.

¹⁰⁹ Vijay Prashad, Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (Oakland: AK Press, 2012).

¹¹⁰ For neo-imperialist attitudes in Western culture, see Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Pantheon, 1993).

¹¹¹ Quoted in Barber, A Hard Rain Fell, 62.

¹¹² Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class (New York: Nation Books, 2011). See also Sheldon Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2010).