Thank you, sir.
It's difficult to answer, but I will try to provide you with my views on it. There isn't a day that goes by without this conflict being in my mind at one point. In fact, I will take it to the ethical level as well.
If the mission is to protect the population from those who inflict violence, and I have to neutralize that, and it may involve endangering the population at the same time, how do I deal with that? Do I accept a smaller amount, five casualties, to protect a hospital with 2,000 people in it, and how do I come to grips with that? That's what commanders do. Those are the ethical and moral aspects.
I've given you a tactical or an operational example that we can extrapolate, if you wish, to the strategic level, as to the responsibility to protect vis-à-vis recognizing the national sovereignty of a nation and at what point does the international community say that's enough of that and we need to get involved. Hence, the need for legitimacy at the international level as a foundation to act.
I think that's the first part, because if we act from the military perspective, Libya is not a model for anywhere else. Libya was a model for Libya and that's it. The next time someone's going to have to look at the next point, the next problem, and figure out all those aspects that I hope I've offered to you for consideration, be it regional support, geography, who are the actors, and put it all together and say, what kind of strategy am I going to use in this problem?
But at one point we're going to have to have good people get involved when bad people cannot get the message. The weapon of choice should be diplomacy, it should be dialogue, and it should be creating an environment. Where that fails, to me, R2P, from my military perspective—and I'm talking only about myself—is about stopping the violence and then creating an environment where dialogue can take place.
My solution, which, by the way, would have been the most complex solution, would have been to stop sometime in May. If the regime had said, we're stopped, we're done, we're going to sit down and talk, that would have been a very political and interesting situation, because then my mission was ended. I would have been done. So it's a complex series.... Then what do we do after that? What would have been the next step? We went through and we discussed this a fair bit.
I think the responsibility to protect, to me, is just a term. From a military perspective, when your mission is to protect the population, how do you go about that? How do you connect your kinetic activity and your non-kinetic activity and your strategic political activities to mesh them together? I believe it becomes more important to have military and civilian consultation and coordination, because much of it will be done at that level.
I suspect I'm not being so naive as to say this is not happening with Afghanistan and others, but it certainly applies a great deal, because the aim is to stop the violence and to move on.