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| Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina | | | Author: | Peter Dale Scott | | ISBN: | 0742525228 | | Format: | Handover | | Publish Date: | June, 2005 | | |  |  |  | | | | | | | Book Review | | | |
Book 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 (War and Peace Library Series): The United States in Afghanistan, Columbia, and Indochina SYNOPSIS The central idea behind this work is that political power pursued by covert means can often metastasize into "deep politics," an interplay of unacknowledged forces over which the original political agent no longer has control. Political analyst Scott applies this idea to the development of American foreign policy, suggesting that often the U.S. has turned to drug traffickers (Colombian paramilitaries, Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, and numerous groups in Indochina) in order to achieve strategic goals, especially control over the world's oil, which originally arose as a corollary of the "containment" of communism. The sections on Indochina are revised versions of chapters from his 1972 work The War Conspiracy. Annotation ©2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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