James V. Hansen: “I think my friend from California has brought up a very interesting point, talking about the Civil War in the United…”

“I think my friend from California has brought up a very interesting point, talking about the Civil War in the United States of America. As we go back and look at the history of that, it was a grisly, mean, dirty, bloody affair, and we lost literally thousands and thousands of our people. Now we look at the thing today, as we talked about, the kind of wars we could look at. The gentleman brought up the idea of weapon proliferation, talking about ethnic, religious wars, problems we have probably not faced at other times, and the gentleman has used a good example which I appreciate the gentleman used, what happened in Iraq. At this point, the big, fourth-largest military might on the face of the Earth moved into Kuwait. It was a war of aggression, much like during the Second World War, when Hitler's Germany moved into Czechoslovakia, France, Scandinavian countries. At that point people wanted to push them out. It was the anticipation, get them out of our country. They have occupied something that is not theirs. It is interesting the gentleman brings up the Civil War, a different kind of war. In Vietnam, what did we have on our hands? We had a civil war on our hands. When you talk to people who were Vietnam veterans, they did not know who was wearing the white hat, who was the right person, a very difficult type of war to get in. Korea was another civil war. Ours was a civil war. The history of civil wars is that they are very tough to win.”