The War on Cancer Meets The War on Terror

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Symptoms vs. Solutions

The War on Cancer
Meets
The War on Terror

by Elmer Brunsman

The United States can't solve its biggest problems. You can solve a problem when you address the problem; you can't when you address only the symptoms. The U.S. is heavily invested in neither understanding nor addressing fundamentally either U.S. health or foreign policy. That has dire consequences.

Allopathic medicine (which we think of as THE medical care, but which is only one of many medical systems worldwide) involves creating for profit a drug to address the symptoms of disease, not the cause of the disease. Current U.S. foreign policy addresses terrorism, a symptom of a problem, not the problem itself.

We spend billions of dollars fighting futile wars--wars against cancer tumors with pharmaceutical drug research and wars against middle eastern movements with military invasions. Tumors are a symptom of malfunctioning in the body. Jihadist movements are a symptom of a malfunction in Islamic societies.

Jihadist grievance is over the U.S. first having invaded either economically, culturally, politically or militarily. Another military invasion fuels the grievance. Likewise, it's the man made chemicals in our environment that cause the cancers that we are fighting with made made drugs. You won't likely solve a problem using the same approach that created the problem, no matter how different you think that chemical approach is from the one that caused the disease or the military tactic is from the one that fueled the terrorism.

Those who won't probe scientifically get angry at being given information that challenges their entrenched position or they deny the facts are valid. We think what we believe is the truth. Established beliefs are defended with our very lives. Those with other beliefs fight just has hard.

Crusader Upton Sinclair asserted that you can't convince a man to know something that his income depends on him not acknowledging. That's even more the case with belief systems. Political belief is a close third to income and religion for closing minds.

Albert Einstein stated: "The significant problems we face cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them." Cancer is not caused by a lack in the body of chemotherapy or radiation. It is forms of those that cause cancers. Militarism won't solve the problems created by militarism. Any "victory" will be temporary. Any cure will be temporary. Cancer and the foreign policy problem will reoccur.

Bush and mouthpieces in the right wing media blare that peace follows victory. If winning a war were actually convincing hearts, minds and souls, then might could make peace. If the Germans had won W.W.II would might have made right? Did it when Ghengis Khan conquered Asia? Or for that matter when Islam conquered India and Spain in the middle ages? Those "victories" did not bring lasting peace.

But didn't militarism work to defeat Nazism? Nazism wasn't a response to a legitimate national grievance by a people opposing occupation. Nazism itself encroached militarily and occupied other countries. Countering that militarily could work. Fighting terrorism militarily is swatting at a symptom of something different.

Terrorism has widespread support as pay back for grievances against the U.S. A recent respected survey found that 61% of Iraqis support attacks on Americans. A reported U.S. State Department poll said that nearly 75% of Baghdad residents would feel safer if U.S. forces withdrew. Terrorism was relatively limited before the Iraq invasion. The U.S. government admits that after the Iraq invasion Al-Queda is active in 65 countries.

The only thing that can work: the U.S. needs diplomacy, intelligence, help of allies in the Middle East, the entire international community, which it had right after 9/11, and prevention. Against cancer it would be the non-chemical drug methods shown to be effective as well as methods of prevention. But for that you need to deal with the cause.

A former U.S. operative, John Perkins, disclosed in his Confessions of an Economic Hit Man the part he played in U.S. policy abroad. His job was to convince foreign leaders to accept bank loans which would put the country into impossible to repay debt and thereby make them beholding to the U.S. Leaders who refused mysteriously died or were assassinated. Perkins tells how U.S. economic force, followed by covert operations, and when that fails, military force, is long standing U.S. foreign policy that the victim countries remember but which U.S. citizens ignore.

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Elmer Brunsman's credentials include: early Peace Corp Volunteer, Ph.D. studies in education, public affairs radio producer, media consultant, college professor, history teacher and alternative medicine researcher.

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