Uncertainty about Taxes

Republicans and businessmen complain about uncertainty for planning, but a lot of that is due to the fact that businessmen are lobbying for change, and Republicans want to give them lower taxes.  Meanwhile they block major changes to the tax code that might increase some sort of taxes.  The Republicans have problems because they have so many special interests to take care of, from defense contractors to oil companies, to neighborhood businesses.  Something that helps one, might harm another.  So, they are responsible for much of the uncertainty that they complain about.  

Kissinger and Shultz Op-Ed on Iran

Kissinger and Shultz have a thoughtful op-ed in the WSJ on the Iran nuclear deal.  However, they criticize it without offering an alternative.  Could the deal be better?  Of course, Iran could have renounced all nuclear ambitions and completely shut down its nuclear activities.  But I doubt that even Kissinger and Shultz could have negotiated an agreement on those terms.  So what is the alternative?  Implicit in their op-ed is the conclusion that only a military attack taking out all of Iran's nuclear facilities would prevent the proliferation of nuclear technology throughout the Middle East.  But would "shock and awe" work better in Tehran than it did in Baghdad?  It would probably bring on a wider war that would make the Iraq war look like a small skirmish.

Furthermore, they do not mention Pakistan (or India), the elephants in the room when it comes to the proliferation of nuclear technology in the region.  India does not appear to be a problem under its present government and the present international situation, but Pakistan is a big problem.  Pakistan has many nuclear weapons, most aimed at India, but available for other purposes, if the government so decides, or if terrorists get their hands on them, and Pakistan's Waziristan region is full of Taliban terrorists.  Even if Pakistan does not sell a nuclear weapon and if the terrorists don't get their hands on one, it is a source of nuclear technology.  It has probably already provided some assistance to Iran and North Korea.

Pakistan is a more clear and present danger to the world than Iran is, mainly because Pakistan has nuclear weapons, and Iran does not.  In theory Pakistan is a friend of the US, but in fact it is a fickle friend, often providing sanctuary for Taliban terrorists from Afghanistan who have been fighting American troops.  In addition, it is probably a closer friend of China than it is of the US, with whatever geopolitical consequences that may produce.  China is much less concerned about world peace than it is about the welfare of the Chinese state.

So, Secretaries Kissinger and Shultz, why should we be more worried about Iran than Pakistan?  Shouldn't we be happy to turn down the heat with Iran, even a little bit, while new fires seem to be springing up daily in the rest of the Middle East?

Jews Bought Sen. Cotton's Letter to Iran

I was distressed by this article in the NYT, “GOP’s Israel Support Deepens as Political Contributions Shift.”  It says that Republican support for Israel in partly ideological, but also “a product of a surge in donations and campaign spending on their behalf by a small group of wealthy donors.”  One of the main beneficiaries of this Jewish largess was Senator Tom Cotton, the author of the Senate letter to Iran, advising it not to negotiate with Obama and Kerry.  It sounds like Sen. Cotton got well over $1 million from these Jewish contributors.  The article quotes a source downplaying speculation that the draft letter and plans for its circulation were developed by Sen. Tom Cotton, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, and Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson in a room of Mr. Adelson’s Venetian Hotel.

The growing Jewish support for Republicans is odd because Jews have traditionally supported the Democratic Party, and tend to support more liberal causes.  According to J Street, a majority of Jews still support liberal Democrats, but the fewer extremely wealthy Jews supporting the Republicans throw the money balance in favor of the GOP.  For this group, the main issue is support for Israel.  This one reason Republican House Speak Boehner invited Israeli PM Netanyahu to make a speech to Congress attacking President Obama. 

I don’t believe that American and Israeli interests always converge.  Thus I question Sen. Cotton’s patriotism in supporting Israel over the United States.  Clearly the choice of Netanyahu and his Republican supports was (and is) to have the United States carry out a bombing attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.  There is certainly a significant risk that American planes could be shot down, or that Iran would respond to the attack.  Among other potential targets, there are thousands of American service men and women next door to Iran in Afghanistan, and a few still left in Iraq.  Sen. Cotton apparently is happy to have them die for Israel.  

Revisionist Holocaust History

For Jews, World War II was all about the Holocaust.  How many people died in the Soviet Union or Western Europe, or certainly in the Pacific doesn’t matter.  All that matters in how many Jews died in the Holocaust.  Even there, what’s important is only the Jews who died.  They don’t care about the Poles, the Gypsies, the blacks, the gays, or any other groups who died in the German prison camps.  Jews are attempting to rewrite history to support their view, and because of the single-mindedness of their effort, they are succeeding. 

The latest shot in this Jewish war against honoring the Allies’ victory in World War II is Nicholas Berg’s “The Holocaust and the West German Historians.”  According to the review in the Wall Street Journal, this book is something of an academic attack on West German historians for playing down the role of the Holocaust in their histories of World War II.  Appropriately the reviewer, Brendan Simms, is somewhat critical of the book.  He says:

Mr. Berg presents his case in a tone of polemical outrage, which occasionally jars in an academic narrative but seems excusable in light of the story he is telling.

Mr. Berg fails to acknowledge that German historians were engaged in not only a personal but also a national survival strategy. They were desperately seeking an intellectual and ethical basis upon which the German people could start again amid the wreckage of 1945.

My main complaint is that Jewish historians do not give enough credit to the Allies, Soviet, British and American, for their victory.  As bad as the Holocaust was, life for Jews would have been worse if the Germans had won.  I believe that the reason we have a World War II memorial on the Washington Mall is that history, led by Jewish historians, has been rewritten to downplay the Allied victory.  WW II vets thought that their victory would be memorial enough, but as their victory became less praiseworthy, they eventually needed something concrete to memorialized their deeds.