Mr Smith in Washington
Nicholas von Hoffman
Washington Mr Ian Smith, the Rhodesian Prime Minister, has finally gone home. It seemed as though Smith had been here for an eon batting from one city to another and repeating his message that the United States government should not be supporting Communist-supplied and trained terrorists seeking to destroy his recently liberalised regime. The gist of Mr Smith's speeches has been we have done what you wanted and granted one-man-one-vote, so why are you giving aid and comfort to the bolshies?
A small number of Americans are asking the same thing of an administration which fears that any other policy will make the United States appear racist and neocolonial in most Black African eyes. The Rhodesian Prime Minister's public relations task here hasn't been made easier by the suspicion that the conservatives who invited him here have a nasty tinge of antiblack to them. One of the enduring difficulties about the whole Rhodesian discussion has been the tendency to make the African conflict an occasion for working out essentially domestic feelings about race. Hence those who have a good word for Smith risk being thought to be bigots: conversely those advocating a hard line against him are likely to be suspected of harbouring some, dangerously ideological virus.
The mass of the .population continues to be uninterested. Neither tales of slaughtered missionaries nor pictures of Rhodesian paratrooper action on the television cause much comment. If Mr Smith and hir government are destroyed by the black irregulars who stalk them, the administration will not be accused of having 'lost' Rhodesia the way the Truman administration was accused of having lost China. Rather than argue about losing Rhodesia, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that whoever finds it is welcome to it.
There is considerably less of a 'finders keepers' attitude toward the EgyptianIsraeli negotiations. Since Camp David, the treaty, if there ever is one, has become even more President Carter's personal tar baby. There have been days, when, with the Egyptians acting glum and silent and Moshe Dayan warning that splits were widening, the American President needed the treaty more than its putative signatories.
The White House drill in the reaction to every setback, including the departure of the two principal Israeli negotiators for consultations back home, has been to insist that things are fundamentally fine. The President has twice said so himself, and he may be right. There's no settled opinion in Washington about whether or not the issues dividing the two parties are serious or just bargaining gambits. But it has been said that Israeli behaviour may be directed toward the United States rather than the Egyptians.
By all reckonings the Sinai withdrawal is going to cost the Israelis a great deal of money. So far all President Carter has promised is to replace two airfields, but that won't begin to cover the loss of the Sinai oil fields nor a host of other things — not the least of which will be the relocation of the settlements the Israelis unwisely established on land they should have known they would have to give back. One way to get these bills paid by Uncle Samuel would be to make the peace negotiations long, sticky, and uncertain.
But while the betting is still in favour of a successful Middle East treaty negotiation, the SALT talks are another matter. After the optimistic noises being made a month or so ago, depression and doubt have reasserted themselves. Paul Warnke, the chief SALT negotiator and the head of the arms control and disarmament agency, has announced his resignation. Why Warnke, who has a reputation as a convinced and committed proponent of disarmament, has decided to drop out now is in dispute. Mr Warnke says he has to go off and make some money to put his kids through college; the political insiders say Warnke was forced out because his reputation as a believer in disarmament would make getting a SALT treatythrough the Senate much harder thanit already is; a third conjecture is that Warnke has concluded the administration, can't or won't negotiate a meaningful treaty..
While the President has been conducting himself with decorum, Congress has been at its worst. In the last weeks before it adjourned itself into history, it passed a Public Works Appropriation Bill that was so bad even its beneficiaries were loath to defend it in public. This kind of classic, 'pork-barrel' legislkion, loaded as it is with construction projects and jobs for so many Congressional districts, is supposed to be unbeatable. Nevertheless, the President vetoed it.
Then in the last hours before adjournment, the boys and girls pushed through a tax Bill. The scene was more like a zoo on fire than a deliberative body. Every animal in the legislative bestiary could be seen running to and fro in mad, irrational excitement until the rhinos and the hippos and the lemurs and the hyenas had enacted a tax Bill cutting revenues by a little less than 19 billion dollars. The run to get out of town as quickly as possible was so powerful that the Bill was passed without being printed — and therefore read by those voting on it. In fact, it will be some days before the bits and pieces are collated and everybody knows for sure what's in the new law. How the bits and pieces were introduced into the Bill is well enough known, however. In some of the last-hour Committee meetings there were several hundred lobbyists in the room running up to their favourite Representatives to get special amendments inserted in the law for their clients. Thus the he of Ernest and Julio Gallo, the Californiairvsintners, had a special clause inserted on their behalf as did the slot-machine industry, which won removal of taxes on its onearm bandits. In general the Bill gives tax relief M the same irrational, hopscotching way that a tornado will pop through a Mid-western trailer camp, a corn field and a shopping centre. Thus among the recipients breaks were greenhouses, pigpens, rnfiltkaixn o o g parlours, chicken coops, and cor porations like the Ford Foundation. But American income tax forms are so complicated almost none of us are able to compute our own taxes. A whole industrY, that of tax preparers, has grown up thanks to the unfathomably incomprehensible tax forms, and every cry for federal tax reform includes a demand for tax simplification. The new tax Bill answers this plea by empowering the Federal tax gatherers to reimburse volunteers for any expenses incurred in helping persons over the age of sixty to fill out their tax forms.
Previous page
