Tom, here's what urban legends and folklore has to say about that,
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl-colin-powell.htm
Jim in Palmdale
Comments: Here's a prime example of how facts become garbled when run
through the rumor mill.
Although U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell did utter words similar to the
above, he was not in England at the time, nor was he responding to the
current Archbishop of Canterbury, nor was the topic "empire building." What
he actually said has been altered and placed in a false context so it reads
like a verbal slap in the face to America's "ungrateful" foreign critics,
but that is not the spirit in which it was originally made.
The words were spoken during Powell's address to the World Economic Forum in
Davos, Switzerland on January 26, 2003. The speech was a reiteration and
defense of the U.S. government's position that military force against Saddam
Hussein, whether unilateral or by coalition, would not only be justified but
necessary if the disarmament of Iraq could not be quickly achieved by other
means.
In a question-and-answer session afterwards (during which the phrase "empire
building" was never mentioned), the secretary of state was asked by former
Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey if he felt the U.S and its allies had
given due consideration to the use of "soft power" - the promulgation of
basic moral and democratic values as a means of achieving progress towards a
peaceful world - versus the "hard power" of military force.
Here, in part, is how Colin Powell actually responded to Carey's question.
There is nothing in American experience or in American political life or in
our culture that suggests we want to use hard power. But what we have found
over the decades is that unless you do have hard power - and here I think
you're referring to military power - then sometimes you are faced with
situations that you can't deal with.
I mean, it was not soft power that freed Europe. It was hard power. And what
followed immediately after hard power? Did the United States ask for
dominion over a single nation in Europe? No. Soft power came in the Marshall
Plan. Soft power came with American GIs who put their weapons down once the
war was over and helped all those nations rebuild. We did the same thing in
Japan.
So our record of living our values and letting our values be an inspiration
to others I think is clear. And I don't think I have anything to be ashamed
of or apologize for with respect to what America has done for the world.
[Applause.]
We have gone forth from our shores repeatedly over the last hundred years
and we've done this as recently as the last year in Afghanistan and put
wonderful young men and women at risk, many of whom have lost their lives,
and we have asked for nothing except enough ground to bury them in, and
otherwise we have returned home to seek our own, you know, to seek our own
lives in peace, to live our own lives in peace. But there comes a time when
soft power or talking with evil will not work where, unfortunately, hard
power is the only thing that works.
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