I got that three IC on and said, “Hi. This is General MacKenzie.” He said, “Yes, and where are you?” I said, “I'm with UNPROFOR.” He said, “What country is that in”? I said it was the former Yugoslavia, and he asked where I was. I said, “I'm in Sarajevo.” He said, “What do you do?” That's when I hung up. I mean, that was the level of incompetence at UN in New York at the time.
It had no priority within the Security Council, the General Assembly, or whatever. That's what happened. We backed off. Afghanistan came along later, and now we're doing something that we know how to do, and we get proper leadership, even though with some of the caveat bullshit that showed up in NATO, it was very frustrating. It wasn't quite as homogenous as we thought it was going to be in Command and Control, but nevertheless, at least the troops, the equipment, the training, and the leaders were there to compensate.
It was the mid-nineties when we all backed off. Rwanda, Srebrenica, Somalia: that's what caused us to pull back. Was it worth dying for? That was the question. The mission no longer was worth dying for.