Thank you very much, Mr. Harris. I appreciate your question.
Let me be perfectly clear, because you've stated it, but I will restate it: my mission was not regime change. In fact, if you followed the tactics that we employed, if I'd had a regime change mandate I would have done it differently. I'm not going to go much further than that because of the classification of the aspects of it, but I can assure you of that.
In fact, Gadhafi had the choice. He could have stopped any time. If he had stopped in May or June or July and said, “That's it—I'm stopping violence”, my mission would have come to an end.
In fact, we prepared a lot of these points as we went along, because what would be the criteria upon which we would have met the objectives that we were given? Those were: the cessation of hostilities; the movement of all equipment away, because we didn't want this to be a pause to rearm and reload, and in an observable manner, so that we could observe the situation; and finally, continuing the humanitarian assistance movement unimpeded. These were the three main ones, with subcategories, that we went with.
Except that the regime opted to fight until the last moment.
If I could, I'll opine on that a little bit, because it also had impacts. While he had very few friends, we also probably made our life difficult. I wish not to be critical, but if you make an international indictment of someone, you leave very few exit strategies for these individuals. These were choices, obviously, that other bodies made, and I respect those—I serve. But when we need to consider strategy, I think we need to consider what the exit is. Do we leave these folks an exit ramp or not? In this case, if there are no exit ramps, then not necessarily regime change.... But we will use the broadest interpretation, because what we were given was to use all available means to bring an end to the violence against the population, and we did that. I'm convinced that we stayed well within those limits; we never strayed outside that.
Therefore, if I summarize it, no, it was not regime change, but it certainly became that, because the regime opted to fight until the last moment. Second, we left them no strategy out of it, sir.