Scott, Peter Dale. Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. May 2003, 225 pages.
 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.
Reviews
"This is a brilliant, compelling, and startlingly original expose of American foreign policy as oil policy with an addiction to drug trafficking as its adjunct. It makes most academic and journalistic explanations of the dreadful paradoxes of our past and current interventions read like government propaganda written for children." -- 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
"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." -- Robin Ramsay, Lobster, Winter 2003, 38-39
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