Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for his contribution to the debate tonight. It was a well-written and well-read speech.
I know the member has had considerable military experience. We are happy to see that and we thank him for his contribution as a fighter pilot, a lieutenant colonel in the air force and serving on the defence committee and the joint board. I agree with him about the capability of our military, in particular our special operations forces.
I do have one question for the member. Being an experienced military person, he would also know that one of the areas that has been historically rife for what we are calling mission creep has been this whole notion of military advisers being sent in as an advance team, such as in the Vietnam War, the 3,000 or 4,000 sent in by President Kennedy leading to the Vietnam War. It is one thing to be training people, such as in Jamaica with the Canadian Joint Incident Response Unit training others to do that. That is a valid and useful thing to be doing, and we can do it in many parts of the world, as well as police forces. However, we already have an example, and we are not even a week past President Obama's announcement of the Americans, through the president or the chairman or the joint chiefs of staff, talking about turning his advisers into assault troops along with Iraqi forces. Is this not really part of the slippery slope that Canadians are—