Colin Powell: Quotes about thinking

2000s
Context: My heart grieves when I think about the situation in the Middle East. I've worked very hard on this for two years, and for years before that. But trust is broken down. We have to do everything we can in our power — all of us, the United States, the European Union, any other nation that has the ability to influence the situation in the Middle East — to work with the Palestinians to put in place a leadership that is responsible, with representative institutions of government that will clamp down on terrorism, that will say to its people, "Terrorism is not getting us anywhere. It is not producing what we want: a Palestinian state. It is keeping us away from a Palestinian state."
And we also have to say to our Israeli friends that you have to do more to deal with the humanitarian concerns of the Palestinian people, and you have to understand that a Palestinian state, when it's created, must be a real state, not a phony state that's diced into a thousand different pieces.

Address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (26 January 2003), as quoted in "Secretary of Incoherence" in National Review (27 January 2003) http://article.nationalreview.com/267757/secretary-of-incoherence/mark-r-levin.

2000s
Context: 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.
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.

Response to a question by George Carey (a former Archbishop of Canterbury), after the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (26 January 2003), as to whether the US had given due consideration to the use of "soft power" vs "hard power" against the regime of Saddam Hussein; this has sometimes been portrayed as an accusation by an Archbishop of Canterbury that the United States was engaged in "empire building", in which Powell's response has been paraphrased:

Remark made to Joint Chiefs of Staff General Shelton regarding comments by Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, advocating an attack on Iraq, even before the battle plan for attacking the Taliban was formulated, shortly after the “the crucial meeting took place on September 15 in the Laurel Lodge at Camp David, at which Wolfowitz made the case for action against Iraq.” [Halper, Stefan, Clarke, Johnathan, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, 2004, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 0-521-83834-7 hardback, 149-150]. Also see [Woodware, Bob, Bush at War, 2002, Simon and Schuster, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 0743215389, 61]. (Remark from 9/2001 shortly after 9/11).
2000s

1990s, Letter to Patrick Leahy (1999)

1990s, Letter to Patrick Leahy (1999)