General Dallaire and Dr. Whitman, thank you for being here. Thank you for your service to our country and to the world at large.
I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb and I'm wondering if you'd follow me with a hypothetical.
Let's say it's a Facebook video. Picture a city under chapter VII post-conflict. Let's say it's mostly Iraq at any time in the last decade. You have a female convoy commander who is prepared to move outside of the wire of a forward operating base. Let's say she has a couple of civilian vehicles embedded in her convoy and that there are UN officials who are moving out to meet a local minister to sign an MOU. They go out into the city and a couple of turns later she faces a group of what are clearly young people aiming AK-47s and RPGs at the convoy.
If we pause the video here, I'm wondering if you could unpack that scenario from a human, moral perspective. For women in peace and security, clearly PTSD is involved, but also how messy a scenario is peacekeeping going to remain as we go forward? How quickly are we going to resolve these moral questions?