LONDON -- This time the critics and skeptics are turning out to be wrong. Conventional wisdom holds that one cannot halt an enemy from the air, let alone force a capitulation. Only troops on the ground can do that. This is supposed to be the overriding lesson from the disaster that was the Vietnam War. Now, armchair military experts are crowding the media to tell the world what a disaster the NATO bombing of the Serbs is bound to be.
But as in so many other fields, the power of onward-rushing technology has been overlooked. Selective punishments are now being delivered against the Serbian nation and its brutal leader, Slobodan Milosevic, that seemed only recently to be the stuff of science-fiction magazines.
Utilities are being paralyzed, communications shut off, broadcasting halted, the day-to-day business of government made increasingly impossible. Camouflaged troops are being exposed and pinpointed tank columns smashed. Supply lines have been pulverized. There is, it seems, truly no hiding place for the Serb forces. Only the clouds, and the determination of NATO forces to minimize civilian casualties (this being, in NATO parlance, "a humanitarian war"), have been the Serbs' friends, and now the bad weather has rolled away, leaving Serbia defenseless.