The fridge in the Pentagon.

Bill Clinton, after offering the position of Defense Secretary to everyone but Al Haig, finally settled on William "The Refrigerator" Perry.

Clinton's tortured selection process was enough to give anyone indigestion. First, he sought out Colin Powell; then he foisted the job on Bobby Ray Inman. When Inman wigged out, Clinton begged Warren Rudman and twice waved the job under the nose of Sam Nunn - whose bigotry and bullheadedness the President evidently finds endearing. Nunn was so loyal and inspiring during the gays-in-the-military controversy, why not give him the Pentagon as a reward?

The floundering for Les Aspin's replacement reveals two disturbing facts. First, that Clinton doesn't give a rip about Defense. And second, that he has no political disagreement with the way the Pentagon has behaved under the last two Administrations. Why else would he seek out Powell or Inman, or Sam Nunn for that matter?

For Clinton, the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, bloated "defense" budgets, and the maintenance of the U.S. empire are givens - indeed, they are desirable ends in themselves. In his State of the Union address, he could boast, in language any Republican could have used: "Many people urged us to cut our defense spending further to pay for our government programs. I said no. The budget I sent to Congress draws the line against further defense cuts."

Do we really need $300 billion in Pentagon spending against puny or nonexistent enemies? Clinton thinks so.

And so does William Perry. As Deputy Defense Secretary under Aspin, and as Under Secretary of Defense for research and engineering from 1976 to 1981, Perry has championed high-tech weaponry that sops up billions upon billions of our tax dollars. So enamored of the latest gimmickry is Perry that the vanity license plates on his Mercedes used to read "Hi-Tech," according to The Washington Post.

Perry oversaw the Pentagon's "black budget" - the highly classified expenditure of billions payer dollars that don't even appear on the Pentagon's public accounting sheets. He spearheaded the stealth bomber program, which has cost $40 billion to produce twenty aircraft. And he's a likely supporter of the Pentagon's Milstar program, a $27 billion satellite effort designed for fighting a long nuclear war - as if any nuclear war would last more than a week.

What the Pentagon needs now is not an insider infatuated with the latest gadgetry, but an outsider dedicated to shrinking and democratizing the Pentagon. But Perry, who has worked in the private sector as a Pentagon contractor, embodies the military-industrial complex as much as Inman, only less abrasively. For Clinton, that must have finally tipped the balance in Perry's favor.