Yes, they're very, very different. I would go back to the point that you're dealing with people who are in the midst of the conflict and have no delegation at UN headquarters in New York. There's no flag flying in front of the building. There are factions. Their headquarters are in many cases mobile. You sit down with those folks, as I did 14 times, and you broker a ceasefire.
Then somebody breaks the ceasefire. In many cases, it was the government representative on the Bosnian Muslim side, and for good reason. They were under attack.
You want to meet with the people you signed the deal with, but you can't find them. They're not at the other end. What I did when I got to Sarajevo, for example, as a naive old peacekeeper, was to give telephones, radio sets, to each of the two factions and the government on the same frequency. My thinking was that, as it normally was in previous peace operations, they would sort things out themselves. It didn't work worth a damn. Therefore, it was difficult to follow up on any breaches of the ceasefire, right through me and up to and including Lord Carrington, who was the head of negotiations in the Balkans for a ceasefire.
They're so different that they shouldn't even be compared. They are totally and absolutely different. The UN during the pre-Cold War era always sent the absolute minimum to try to get the job done. They never anticipated the worst-case scenario. They always anticipated the best-case scenario, which was normally accurate.
Let me give you a humorous example. In Cypress in 1965, the Irish Parliament withdrew its forces with 30 days' notice. They were beside the Canadian contingent in northern Cypress. I, as the recce platoon commander of 35 soldiers, was ordered by my commanding officer, General Kirby, a lieutenant-colonel at the time, to go over and replace the Irish contingent with 30-some soldiers. I did that on a Wednesday.
On a Friday—the day is important—the leaders of the Greek Cypriots and the Turkish Cypriots came to me and asked me why I hadn't called them for a meeting on the Friday. I said, “What, you were getting together and meeting?” I was told, “Yes, but it was also happy hour. We always came here and drank for a couple of hours. Then we went back to our positions. We haven't been fighting each other in the last three months.” That doesn't happen anymore. You can't imagine calling in ISIS and al Qaeda and sitting down and having a party.
So it is unbelievably different. That's why you need well-trained, well-led, and well-equipped soldiers with some time for them to work together to become a team.