Thank you, Chair.
Of course, we treat all of our witnesses fairly gently in this committee—so far, at least.
Thank you, General Bouchard, for joining us, and thank you for your lengthy and successful career in the military. It's great that you're able to be here to share your knowledge and experience and perspective with us on this study that we're doing on Canada's participation in NATO and the new NATO concept.
I'll do this through the lens of Libya, of course. Your direct hands-on experience there was quite valuable to the mission and to the success of the mission, and it will be in helping us understand some of the issues.
Some say that the Libya mission was a success in dealing with the protection of civilians, but I don't know if it could be considered a model, or the model; it was a response to a particular crisis that arose fairly quickly. Although Mr. Gadhafi may not have had lots of friends when the time came, he very quickly turned into someone for whom the “responsibility to protect” doctrine became the mechanism by which the Security Council acted.
What concerns me here, in the Libya mission...and I don't know where it affected your activities. I remember a quote from you, which I used because it reflected my concerns. At certain points, certain nations—and certain leaders in certain nations, although I won't get into the detail—and certain foreign ministers were talking about how Gadhafi must go, and about regime change. This was all going on while you and the military were acting under another set of instructions.
I remember a quote from you—I'll paraphrase it and you'll fix it—where in effect you talked about your job: my job is not regime change, my job is based on Resolution 1973, and that's what I'm here to do.
In that context, were there any tensions in relation to that with respect to the military operations and what you were doing? I know this committee had briefings, I guess the summer before and last summer, concerning this, and I was concerned that even NATO itself had chosen different objectives than Resolution 1973 and that it may be interfering with the mission.
Can you give us a general comment on that? There were two things going on, obviously—the very specific 1973 resolution and what some of the nations were saying, and perhaps doing, while you were trying to do something else.