In March 2003 Rowman & Littlefield released my new book, DRUGS, OIL, AND WAR: THE UNITED STATES IN AFGHANISTAN, COLOMBIA, AND INDOCHINA. Two thirds of this book consist of an introduction and six new chapters on drugs and oil in Afghanistan and Colombia. The remainder consists of five updated chapters from my 1972 book The War Conspiracy: The Secret Road to the Second Indochina War.
As of July 2004, the book is now available in German as Die Drogen, das Oel und der Krieg: Zur Tiefenpolitik der USA (Frankfort: Zweitausendeins Versand, 2004), 384 pp., 14.90 euros.
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.
Click here to read the Preface from my new book.
Click here to read extract on why America depends on maintaining the dollar as the designated currency for all OPEC oil sales (a hidden reason for why the Bush regime is intent on war in Iraq).
Publication details are posted on the Rowman and Littlefield website now. And you will receive a 15 percent discount if you click here and purchase from them now.
(Daniel Ellsberg, author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers)
“Peter Dale Scott takes us for a controversial tour along the dark side of American foreign policy. The book builds a powerful case that Washington’s War on Drugs is at best futile and at worst criminal. The overall target is the militarization of our foreign policy. The facts and conclusions are chilling.”
(Robert E. White, former U.S. Ambassador to Colombia)
“No student of political science or political thinker dares overlook this thirty-year tour de force of the dark side of history and the para and deep politics that control so much of our daily lives.”
(Michael C. Ruppert, Publisher/Editor of From the Wilderness)
Robin Ramsay, Lobster, Winter 2003, 38-39: “If you have read Scott, you need read no further; a new book by Scott is an occasion…..Here is another way of looking at it. Because it remains the official stance of the US state, and its self-image, to a large extent, that the US is not an imperial power, its actual imperial policies have to be carried out as far as possible in secret….This combination of secrecy, deception,and scumbag allies, creates deep politics, the `immobilizing substratum of unspeakable scandal and bad faith’ in which the US’s foreign policy — its undeclared foreign policy — has been intertwined with the global drug traffic.”
Review of the German edition:
Thomas Immanuel Steinberg, <I>Jungen Welt</I></a>, 8/21/04: “Peter Dale Scott haelt sein materialistisches Politik- und Geschichtsverstaendnis konsequent durch. Er verficht weder eine Klassentheorie, noch sympathisiert er mit dem Sozialismus. An Scotts Stoffreichtum und seine übersichtliche Argumentation koennte ein sachkundiger Klassenanalytiker mit Gewinn anschliessen.”