Every president goes through a learning process.

You suddenly walk in the Oval Office, and you're having to deal with national security issues.

And you suddenly get a group from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all in uniform, all with their medals, all telling you something that should or should not be done.

And very frankly, it's intimidating.

Because, you know, you may have been a senator or a governor but you never had to make decisions that involve life and death.

[indistinct archival audio recording] There was a peculiar situation as the Clinton administration took over It inherited the possibility for a different world order, because the old world order was gone.

The question was: what the Clinton administration's attitude going to be about the use of force as an instrument of national policy?

Yes, you were trying to come up with a policy solution for a given country, like Bosnia.

But at the same time, it had to somehow fit into another equation that related to American power almost anywhere in the world.

[distant fighter jet rumbles] [blast] [wings flap] [air-raid siren] [Samantha Power] At the beginning of the war, the Bosnian people had such hope, with President Clinton, that we were going to act, and that their sense of curiosity, they knew everything.

They knew McCain, Biden, you know who was up, who was down, who was up for re-election.

I mean, when your life depends on it... [truck passes by] [somber music] I was struck, in the most remote parts of Bosnia, how knowledgeable people were, who were just desperate for salvation.

[fire crackles] [baby cries] [inaudible chatter in foreign language] [indistinct archival audio recording] Beginning of 1993 there are a series of meetings in the White House and there were sharp disagreements.

Particularly about the use of force.

The military was strongly against it.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Powell, national hero, was adamantly opposed to it.

[Madeleine Albright] We were all new and Colin Powell had just won the Gulf War.

He was the hero of the Western world.

Big handsome man with medals all over.

[indistinct archival audio recording] He was the best briefer ever.

We would ask him: ‘So what can we do?'

He would always say: 'We can take this mountain and do this' And ultimately, he would say, ‘But it would take several hundred thousand troops and many billions of dollars...' So he would walk us up a hill and say we could do it, and then drop us off the other side.

But he was the expert.

[indistinct archival audio recording] [Colin Powell] I never intended to intimidate anyone.

I always intended to give them straightforward military advice, as to how force could be used.

It was theirs to make the political decision.

What Madeline overlooks in that is that, even though my uniform is very lovely, and I know how to brief a group, there was no enthusiasm within that group to send military force into the former Yugoslavia, because it looked like it was coming apart.

[indistinct archival audio recording] [Madeleine Albright] I have to admit, in my case, that I was deeply moved by what I had seen: people being killed, or ethnically cleansed.

Not for anything that they had done, but who they were.

I thought, we have to do something.

[indistinct archival audio recording] I actually got into an argument with him over this, and I finally said to him, ‘Colin, what are you saving this military for?'

he got really mad at me and said, ‘Our soldiers are not toy soldiers.'

Why can't we use this wonderful army you always talk about?

And I just made the point to her: We can use it anytime you ask, if you have a clear purpose of what you are trying to achieve [indistinct archival audio recording] [Colin Powell] I don't know what objectives would have been set or what political goals the President might have articulated at that time.

He didn't articulate any.

[Bill Clinton, archival recording] Look, you know as much about this as I do right now.

We'll just have to look into it and we'll see.