Triumph Of Fear
by George Liebmann

Peggy Noonan's bizarre appeal in The Wall Street Journal for the preservation of obsolete military bases fulfils a prophecy of the organizer of World War II American science, Vannevar Bush, in a wise and too-neglected book about the possibilities of state terrorism written in 1949: "There is a fascination in fear. There is a vortex that surrounds the concept of doom. When there is stark terror about, men magnify it and rush towards it. Those who have lived under the shelter of a wishful idealism are most prone to rush into utter pessimism when the shelter fails. No terror is greater than the unknown, except the terror of the half-seen."

Bush cautioned against such reactions: "Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic, and it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation." The Military Base Closing Commission has pursued just that course, which Ms. Noonan renounces. She attributes prodigies of organization to people hiding in caves in Pakistan and Afghanistan of which Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, with the backing of industrialized modern states and millions of co-nationals living in the United States, proved incapable .She rejects closing military bases the Commission finds unnecessary simply because "people will feel that need for protection" by the military against terrorism .

That is, the "feeling"--of fear, of course--is what is important not the reality of what bases are rationally necessary. It is a rejection of reason and the triumph of fear. Further, "protection" in our system has historically been provided by local law enforcement and our now misused National Guard rather than our military forces. It was an overriding purpose of our Constitution to keep the military out of domestic government and to guard against the re-creation on American soil of the dictatorship of the Earl of Stafford, based on a standing army. The President Ms. Noonan once served did not forget this. Ms. Noonan has. If her course is followed, there will be nothing left to defend.

George Liebmann, a Baltimore lawyer, is the author of The Common Law Tradsition: A Collective Portrait of Five Law Professors (Transaction Books, 20005).

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