Because one set of people are willing to drop bombs on a great height and fly away, while another set of people, the UN peacekeepers on the ground, have to wake up the morning after and live with the consequences. So this situation showed how words applied for diplomatic purposes can be operationally unimplementable on the ground. But interestingly, as the political will of the international community and particularly the Western world changed, those same words found themselves susceptible to different interpretations, so that one after the other, the same resolution, which had given us this mandate for impotence in a very difficult situation, became interpreted to justify the exclusion zones around Sarajevo after the market-place massacre of January 1994. And so one of the lessons that it teaches me as a writer is how much words can conceal, but also how easily words themselves can lend themselves to different political purposes when those purposes change. So the reality of the world when you are a man of action, a man of diplomacy, is that words are given flesh over time by changing circumstances.
Words can kill.
Words can save. Words have an extraordinary power to lay out the possibilities for people in the world of action. To download streaming video for this page, you will need the RealPlayer plug-in, free from RealNetworks.