Drugs, Oil, & War: The US in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina

Per request of sublumen

Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina, -- by,,Peter Dale Scott

Product Description
Peter Dale Scott's brilliantly researched tour de force illuminates the underlying forces that drive U.S. global policy from Vietnam to Colombia and now to Afghanistan and Iraq. He brings to light the intertwined patterns of drugs, oil politics, and intelligence networks that have been so central to the larger workings of U.S. intervention and escalation in Third World countries through alliances with drug-trafficking proxies. The result has been a staggering increase in global drug traffic. Thus, the author argues, the exercise of power by covert means, or parapolitics, often metastasizes into deep politics - the interplay of unacknowledged forces that spin out of the control of the original policy initiators. Scott contends that we must recognize that U.S. influence is grounded not just in military and economic superiority but also in so-called soft power. We need a soft politics of persuasion and nonviolence, especially as America is embroiled in yet another disastrous intervention, this time in Iraq.

Drugs, Oil and War explores the underlying factors that have engendered a US strategy of indirect intervention in Third World countries through alliance with drug-trafficking proxies. This strategy was originally evolved in the late 1940s for the containment of Communist China; it has been resorted to since to secure control over foreign petroleum resources. The result has been a staggering increase in the global drug traffic and the mafias assorted with it, a problem that will worsen until there is a change in policy. The book traces also some of the processes by which some of these covert interventions have escalated into war, and how present strategies to support the US dollar have come to depend on US domination of the global oil economy. 248 pages