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Perhaps the most unfortunate thing about this book is the sensational (pulp-fictony) cover. It would be unfortunate if this gives the wrong impression (that this is a fringe "conspiracy" and not a valid "history" book) and so turns off potential readers. The content is otherwise excellent, authoritative and intelligent, with my main caveat being that the author assumes an already well educated readership - either from reading his many books detailing the covert CIA/government/organized crime connections with many of these same topics (which I have not), or informed about the situation for other sources (which I have somewhat). The result is he covers a lot of ground quickly, providing a rather condensed summary of his long writing career in historical/political analysis. I have no first hand knowledge of any of this history, but from my other readings over the past few decades it is corroborated repeatedly.
Scott's basic premise (and this book is a 50:50 mix of a reprinting of the core of his '72 book THE WAR CONSPIRACY which dealt with US involvement in Indochina, and a 2002 update covering ongoing developments in Columbia and Afghanistan) is that the US, in it's attempt to thwart the spread of communism (and now more recently Islamic fundamentalist terrorism), focuses on oil and drugs to do two things with foreign policy - secure and control foreign oil resources, and utilize drug traffickers as allies and the drug trade as covert revenue. The irony is that the infamous "War on Drugs" is more a war for oil supported by expensive illegal drugs. The effects range from widespread (and increasingly violent) resistance to American hegemony to a huge increase in world-wide drug addiction. It is perhaps no coincidence that when the US invaded Afghanistan after 9-11, the Taliban had effectively suppressed opium production there, and the resulting removal of the Taliban led to Afghanistan's largest poppy crop and a much needed 400 billion dollar influx of drug money to the recently recessed world economy... (for more details see Ruppert's
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
).
There are many books full of this kind of detailed information, but too often they get marginalized and miss getting mainstream exposure and acceptance. Perhaps the average American thinks they are too sensational, extreme and hyperbolic (being just too conspiracy oriented). Perhaps, among those of us who care, we are left wondering what to believe, which book is information and which is disinformation (purposely planted to distract or delude us) This book, while detailed and focused on the nexus of oil resources and drug trafficking, is relatively concise and sober (supported with extensive footnotes), and appears to be the real deal. Scott no longer considers this a "conspiracy" as much as a generally accepted (albeit secretive) way of doing things, for a variety of sometimes conflicting motives, with an equally mixed variety of intended and unintended consequences. His particular point of view may well be partial, incomplete and biased (and the product of disinformation itself), but it is none the less a documentation of a slice of history and worthy of study along the trail of uncovering the larger picture and underlying pattern.
(What I disagree with Scott about is his view that this is primarily a "right-wing" phenomena/conspiracy. It seems that such ideological clarity is muddied considerably in the Powers-That-Be's desire to gain stability and maintain control, and as such, sounds a lot like the pragmatically motivated classic '3rd Way' of fascism - which has become the status quo almost by default. The result is that politics in America today is mostly "Progressive" in practice if not name, in other words; the centralized union of State and Corporation is almost complete in our anti-individualistic Brave New World. It may not be the violent/ugly fascism of Nazi Germany, but even in it's smily-faced form its pretty intolerant and plenty dangerous.)
I can understand if people are unsure what to believe and trust, but still find it amazing that more Americans don't know of, or care about, the ongoing entangled connections between America's foreign policy, the oil and military industrial lobbies, the CIA and the drug war/trade, or if they hear of it, dismiss it as unbelievable (or even a necessary evil!). It is a truly unholy alliance that needs to be exposed to a much wider audience (for a detailed view of how the CIA got involved in covert operations also see
The Secret History of the CIA
, or how the CIA was formed by it's bad side and uses it's legitimate but naive good side as a smokescreen and scapegoat see
Psychological Warfare and the New World Order: The Secret War Against the American People
).
But then again, maybe the fact that this information has been ignored repeatedly, and the benefactors of such a drug trade have done so well, so popularly (President Clinton being the most prominent example), indicates that the American people want to be kept ignorant and well supplied with the fruits of ongoing war, foreign oil, illegal drugs and the massive industries built up around supporting these.
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