Base motives.

• Author: Lochhead, Carolyn

James Courter, chairman of the third and most recent commission on military base closings, was wont to open each meeting of his seven-member panel with words of encouragement, sometimes sounding suspiciously like entreaties. The commission, Courter insisted, was engaged in something just and even noble. It was not, as some would suggest, a heartless Grim Reaper come to snatch away the jobs and lives of innocent, hard-toiling Americans.

A tangible reward of American triumph at the end of the Cold War, base closings will benefit Americans, Courter repeatedly told the dozens of reporters standing by to beam the bad news back home. "Their preciously earned money," he said, "large gobs of which are appropriated by the federal government, will be used for the essential things, rather than squandered."

The scribblers would usually pause for a rest at these words of the former Republican congressman from New Jersey, whose appointment was one of George Bush's last official acts. Courter always seemed to speak in error-free sentences of multiple dependent clauses that were difficult to grab hold of without a tape recorder. And of course the real news was which base would close and which would stay open, not some amorphous greater social good that flowed from the process.

Perhaps the cynical scribes were right to ignore Courter's standard speech. In fact, large gobs of taxpayers' precious earnings will continue to be squandered, if not on obsolete military bases, then on warmed-over schemes for "defense conversion," "worker retraining," "high-technology infrastructure investment," and other plots of Clintonites and old-fashioned Capitol Hill politicians.

If the base-closing process illustrated anything, it was Congress's complete incapacity to cut spending, no matter how obsolete, redundant, or wasteful. That the commission structure was even in place to handle the job of dismantling America's Cold War military machine was due more to accident than foresight. It was first devised by Texas Republican Rep. Dick Armey as a way to circumvent the political paralysis that prevented Congress from closing anything--from San Francisco's country-clubby Presidio, established by the Spaniards 217 years ago, to a 19th-century Utah fort founded by the U.S. cavalry to guard stagecoach routes against Indian attacks.

Politicians whose bases were threatened blitzed the commission and anyone else who felt obliged to listen with endless faxes, letters, studies, and phone...