I would say that your points in this post are well taken. So, I agree. We don't really know what would happen in the event of an actual ground force invasion some months from now, if one were to happen. I have been pounded on this matter here by a progressive anti-war friend who was in the military for a long time and claims that the latest US high-tech gizmos would zap the Yugoslav military like pathetic lambs, if the full force of the US military were to really get in there. Maybe.
However, I would note that the Serbian force in Krajina was not the regular Yugoslav military but an irregular Serbian militia. Any ground invasion would indeed be dealing with the actual Yugoslav military on its home turf---much better armed than those militias in Krajina, I imagine. So, we don't know.
But those who predict an easy victory should be cautious. After all, some of those (not all) were already predicting that air power would do the trick, duuuh.... Barkley Rosser -----Original Message----- From: Greg Nowell <GN842 at CNSVAX.Albany.Edu> To: lbo talk <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Thursday, April 15, 1999 8:34 PM Subject: Serbian resistance capability.
>(Rosser, repeating a frequently voiced opinion):
> Hitler never was able to suppress the
>Yugoslav guerrillas, despite quickly "taking Belgrade"
>and having massive and brutal forces in place.
>
>GN: the complications of Hitler's effort are much
>greater than are supposed in the common notion of Serbs
>as antifascists and Croats as pro-fascists. (Most
>Croats were more anti-Serb than pro-fascist, which may
>seem subtle, but it matters.) For example, part of
>what was gong on was that Serbian anti-communists were
>pushed by the Italian fascists to attack the German
>Nazi/Croat operations (yet they had harbored the Croat
>leader before he went to direct operations on berhalf
>of the Nazis). And as I have mentioned the Nazis
>themselves were split about whether to back the
>Croats. All this suggests that *part* of the success
>of the Serbian resistance was due to incoherencies in
>the German/Italian plans, rivalries between German
>factions, rivalries between Italians and Germans, and
>splits as well in the various nationalities, for as I
>have also mentioned, the Croat anti-Serbian parties of
>the 1930s refused to cooperate with the Nazi occupation
>(at least the leadership, no doubt some of the
>underlings went over). Given this mishmosh it is not
>unsurprisng that some of the most effective resistance
>was in the Serbian parts of Croatia. And which was
>also a good place for an anti-Nazi Croat (Tito) to make
>some good relationships with Serbs.
>
>I would more willingly believe that the Serbs are
>unbeatable, were it not that the Croat offensive, much
>weaker than NATO's theoretical potential, was
>resoundingly successful, even though the Serbs have
>been born bred and trained & equipped for mountain
>resistance, and that the Croats successfully asserted
>control in precisely one of the zones that was highly
>contested in WWII. By the standards of WWII the
>Croats should have gotten hopelessly bogged down. Why
>could they do in the mid-1990s what they couldn't do in
>the 1940s?
>
>One may be for the war or against the war, my point
>here is that I'm not certain that the legendary tying
>down of 40 Nazi divisions is the correct historical
>precedent. Conditions would appear to be very
>different. The only way to test the hypothesis is to
>fight the bloody war. Whether one wants that or not is
>a separate issue from whether the WWII precedent of
>Serbian valor/efficacy is automatically applicable.
>
>It should be noted that in anotehr venue, in the war
>against Iraq the "elite Republican Guard," battle
>tested in over a decade against Iran, was repeatedly
>represented in the media as a terrible foe. It got
>rolled over. Frankly I was quite surprised at how fast
>it collapsed, having followed the Iran-Iraq war with
>some attention. Perhaps, even the US military was
>surprised, given the numbers of body bags they shipped
>over ostensibly for shipping dead Yankees home. To use
>language from another list, Barkley: Non-ergodicity may
>be as much a principle to bear in mind in military
>forecasting as in economic. And why should it not be
>thus. Both represent the operations of social systems.
>
>--
>Gregory P. Nowell
>Associate Professor
>Department of Political Science, Milne 100
>State University of New York
>135 Western Ave.
>Albany, New York 12222
>
>Fax 518-442-5298
>
>
>