Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, Updated edition (Paperback), by Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall. University of California Press (April 10, 1998).
Coauthor Marshall's recent Drug Wars ( LJ 2/15/91) shows how Washington overlooks or supports drug trafficking as part of its efforts to thwart Third World communism around the world. This new book explores in detail the tangled connection between the Nicaraguan Contras, U.S. support for them, and drugs. Marshall and Scott argue that the United States might actually have furthered the flow of cocaine from Central America to the States by colluding with anti-Sandinista forces. Government intimidation of witnesses, a complacent Congress, and timid media have served to keep this a quiet story. Extensive interviews, government records, and secondary sources (enough, in fact, to produce over 60 pages of cited sources), are used to document in great detail how the war on communism took precedence over the war on drugs. An authoritiative account of a crucial but underpublicized issue. Information

Crossroads of Intervention: Insurgency and Counterinsurgency Lessons from Central America (Terrorism, Counterinsurgency, and Irregular Warfare) (Hardcover), by Todd Greentree. Praeger Security International General Interest-Cloth (March 30, 2008).
The challenges that vex the United States today in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere are not altogether as new and unique as they seem. U.S. involvement in Central America during the 1980s clearly demonstrated the costs, risks, and limits to intervention and the use of force in internal conflicts. Much can be learned today about the nature of irregular warfare from the experiences of the United States and the other protagonists in Central America during the final phase of the Cold War. The U.S. perceived a threat to national security in these wars from determined insurgents with a compelling revolutionary ideology and powerful allies that linked them to other conflicts around the world. This strategy and policy analysis makes a new contribution to irregular warfare theory through an examination of the origins, strategic dynamics, and termination of the Sandinista insurrection in Nicaragua, the decade long counterinsurgency of the Salvadoran government against the FMLN guerrillas, and the concurrent Contra insurgency against the Sandinistas. Many of the lessons about the fundamental and recurring nature of irregular warfare are being rediscovered in the current challenges of radical Islam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, despite the great differences in circumstance, culture, and geography. In the Central American case, three successive Presidents encountered serious domestic controversy over U.S. policies and refrained from sending U.S. combat troops to intervene directly. Most importantly, they prudently heeded warnings that internal wars of all types are rarely subject to military solutions, because their natures are equally and fundamentally political. Greentree presents his argument as a strategy and policy case study of the civil wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador during the final decade of the Cold War. The book comprises an examination of the origins, strategic dynamics, and termination of these wars from the points of view of the main participants--Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and the United States. It also develops a general conceptual framework for understanding the nature of insurgency, counterinsurgency, revolution, and intervention that builds on classic strategic theory and contemporary thought on irregular warfare. From the perspective of global superpower conflict, the wars in Central America were peripheral "small wars" or "low intensity conflicts". However, for the internal protagonists these were total and bloody wars for survival. Involvement in such wars has been cyclical in the U.S. experience, and it is misfortunate, if not tragic, that the greatly similar problems encountered across widely varying circumstances are quickly forgotten. Information

Cuba's Military 1990-2005: Revolutionary Soldiers during Counter-Revolutionary Times (Studies of the Americas) (Hardcover), by Hal Klepak. Palgrave Macmillan (September 29, 2005).
This book is the first examination of the Cuban military in the context of Cuba's political and economic challenges in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR--and therefore of Soviet economic, political, and psychological support. It does so by providing important historical and political contexts of the development and engagement of the military. This information and analysis are essential to understanding how U.S-Cuban relations will develop, especially after the changes sure to follow the death Fidel Castro. Information

International Cooperation in Counter-terrorism: The United Nations And Regional Organizations in the Fight Against Terrorism (Hardcover), by Giuseppe Nesi (Editor). Ashgate Publishing (June 2006).  Information

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