Sometimes It's Not An Email Rumor!

Or something Snopes has debunked.

You know I get a lot of feel good emails that paint someone in just the right light, wrapped in a flag. Then you find out it's not true.
Bummer.
But sometimes, it is true.

I got one today that was a series of three stories that were together titled "How To Silence a Room". The first was about Colin Powell. Now the email had a few of the details wrong. But the punch line was true. Here is the correct version.

Colin Powell was attending the World Economic Forum in Switzerland during January, 2003. George Carey, former archbishop of Canterburyasked Powell whether the U.S. was relying too much on "hard power" such as military action as opposed to "soft power" such as appealing to the common values of the major religions and building trust based on those values.

Powell responded by affirming the "soft power" of values but that it was the "hard power" of the military that, for example, helped free Europe and so the "soft power" of peace and reconstruction could take place.

Powell then said, "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."