new book: Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina

[pynchonoid]

"Harken unto me, read thou my lips, for verily I say
that wheresoever the CIA putteth in its meathooks upon
the world, there also are to be found those substances
which God may have created but the U.S. Code hath
decided to control. Get me? Now old Bush used to be
head of CIA, so you figure it out."
-Vineland, p.354


" [...] This book, Drugs, Oil, and War: The United
States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina,
explores the underlying factors that have engendered a
U.S. strategy of indirect intervention in Third World
countries through alliances with drug-trafficking
proxies. This strategy was originally developed in the
late 1940s to contain communist China; it has since
been used 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. 

[...] Today drug networks are important factors in the
politics of every continent. The United States returns
repeatedly to the posture of fighting wars in areas of
petroleum reserves with the aid of drug-trafficking
allies (or what I call drug proxies) with which it has
a penchant to become involved. Surprisingly, this is
true even in Colombia, where we are nominally fighting
a war on drugs; yet the chief drug-trafficking
faction, the paramilitaries, are allies of our allies,
the Colombian army. Worse, they are the descendants of
yet another clever CIA notion -- to train terrorists
to fight the left -- which has once again come back to
haunt us. 

[...]  These problems facing America are by no means
entirely of its own making. But one recurring cause,
commonly recognized, is U.S. dependence on foreign oil
and its need to control international oil markets.
Past U.S. support for drug proxies is another more
covert and less recognized contributing factor, one
that must be acknowledged if the root causes for these
crises are to be addressed. 

Conversely, the great resistance that still exists to
acknowledging past U.S. involvement in and
responsibility for covert intrigues contributes to our
present inability to bring true peace and security to
the rest of the world. The agencies responsible for
past errors are too concerned to preserve not only
their reputations but their alliances and, above all,
the corrupt social systems in which such alliances
have thrived. Consequently an international drug
traffic, which the United States helped enlarge,
continues to thrive. 

I shall argue in this book that covert operations,
when they generate or reinforce autonomous political
power, almost always outlast the specific purpose for
which they were designed. Instead they enlarge and
become part of the hostile forces the United States
has to contend with. To put it in terms I find more
precise, parapolitics, the exercise of power by covert
means, tends to metastasize into deep politics, an
interplay of unacknowledged forces over which the
original parapolitical agent no longer has control.
This is the heart of the analysis. 

[...] In short the etiology or origin of global
terrorism is rooted partly in the historical context
of previous U.S. policy decisions with respect to both
drugs and oil. I say this not to cast blame but to
suggest the proper direction to search for solutions.
Decision makers of a half century ago cannot be
faulted for lacking the foreknowledge that comes more
easily in retrospect. It is, however, not too late to
address the legacy they have left us -- a suspect
affluence grounded in part on the impoverishment of
the rest of the world. As long as that legacy is not
corrected, we can be sure that the problem of
terrorism will remain with us. [...] "

...the preface of the book is available online:
<http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/dowpref.html>






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