Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I am Ken Summers, retired admiral. During the Gulf War, I was the commander of all of the Canadian Forces in the Middle East: the operational command, the aircraft, the ships, the hospitals, all that.

I'm very pleased that, in fact, you've made additional time for this testimony, because I now can be here as opposed to not making it. I'd like to give my very personal perspective, I guess, on what happened in the Gulf War. The bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, is that the Gulf War was a war. It was not a peacekeeping operation, as some people have suggested. I should have brought a piece of the Scud missile that fell at Bahrain near my headquarters to emphasize the point, or perhaps the bullet that went in the sand very close to where I was when I was up in Kuwait City following the liberation.

Anyway, the Iraqi invasion occurred on August 2, 1990. Immediately, the UN Security Council—Canada was a member of the Security Council in those days—passed a number of resolutions, and Canada was very active in those discussions. In fact, our ambassador, Yves Fortier, co-sponsored a number of the resolutions, and I do recall—because I was watching this extremely carefully from Halifax—that he made a statement that has always stuck with me. He said that sometimes you have to make the peace in order to keep the peace, and that's something that turned out to be very true as things developed later on in January 1991.

Well, last week, for the first time, I had an opportunity—that was mentioned to one of your members—to actually go into Hansard and see what was happening on January 15 and January 16. I was at the other end, and I phoned back to Ottawa, and they said, “Well, they're still debating whether we should even be here.” I said, “Well, they'd better hurry up because in about two hours' time, something is going to happen that's going to put this all behind us.”

In any event, it did occur, and those discussions were very interesting. Video and Hansard on January 15 showed that the Prime Minister, among others, made the point that they had passed resolutions but that the deadline was approaching at midnight and that if Iraq did not withdraw from Kuwait, then it was incumbent upon the members of the United Nations to actually enforce the resolution. That set the stage.

In fact, on that point, I noted that on the 16th, when it occurred, there was some discussion still going on. One of the members of Parliament actually came into the House and said they had seen video that the war had already started, and that got the ball going. Very shortly thereafter, actually, the Prime Minister came back in and said that we were now with our allies taking action against Saddam Hussein in Iraq to enforce the resolution.

I noted that, quite correctly, the leader of the opposition, Jean Chrétien, very quickly arose and said.... Well, he had been talking about enforcing the embargo, letting the embargo and those things continue on. Very quickly, he got up and said that they were behind what was going on over there, and they supported the Canadian Forces and our troops over there. It was really quite something.

Shortly thereafter, the government formed a war cabinet, which consisted of the Prime Minister as the head, plus a number of the senior ministers and the chief of the defence staff, John de Chastelain. I would recommend that you get him to come talk to you. John de Chastelain was there at those particular meetings. What happened with the war cabinet is that we provided the information to the war cabinet of what was going on in the Gulf, and in return, they would give us direction in terms of where we could operate and what type of action we could be taking as things went on. It was a two-way street. We were providing the information to them, and when it required their approval for operations, they came back and gave that to us, including areas of operation and also the type of weapons that could be used.

To the 4,000 Canadians who were deployed over there during that particular time—our ships, the aircraft squadrons, the hospital, security and support—the hostilities over there were, in fact, a daily reality. Our ships, which Admiral Miller will no doubt discuss in greater detail when he comes on, were instrumental in the interdiction operations that took place in the gulf prior to actual hostilities. Canada, with only about 5% of the interdiction ships, ended up doing in excess of 25% of all the boardings in the gulf, and quite honestly, we were in the central, middle gulf.

Do I have one minute left, Mr. Chair?