Colin Powell- Should He Run

Colin Powell- Should He Run for Office

Colin Powell should run for presidency? This is a question that can be best answered by looking at the achievements and flaws of Powell's during his term as the military chief as well as the Secretary of States. If Powell ever ran for office, he will serve as the symbol of racial equality in the United States. This means that the country which has always be accused of racial discrimination and rightly so, needs a black president to prove that things have changed since the early days of the Civil rights movement.

But having said that, I feel Colin Powell would make as poor a president as Bush. This may seem like an angry statement but having read about his so-called achievements, I feel Powell could never turn out to be a statesman like President Clinton for example. He lacks the basic human compassion required to take the world into consideration when making important decisions and also doesn't have the spine to stand against bad decisions.

Powell has risen to fame when he successfully launched an attack in the Gulf known as the Operation Desert Storm in 1991. As much as the mission was hailed at home, it later turned out to be simply a show of American power and might in a troubled area. America has some really misleading and misguided foreign policies, and what we need in a President is someone who can see those flaws and correct them. After losing millions of our soldiers and other human lives around the globe due to wrong policies, the last thing we need today is someone who lacks the courage to make the necessary changes. Powell is not the person who can do that.

Instead of telling the truth to the world, he convinced the naive Americans that there indeed were WMDs, which he himself later agreed was a misleading statement. Washington Post (1 Oct, 2006) wrote: "Powell had thrown his considerable personal and professional reputation behind the administration's charges that Iraq possessed chemical, biological and perhaps even nuclear weapons, and posed an imminent threat to the United States. In a crucial speech to the United Nations Security Council six weeks before the invasion was launched, he had single-handedly convinced many skeptical Americans that the threat posed by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was real." fully agree with the fact that Powell was an effective military leader. He won numerous awards and honors. But the question remains: do we need a military chief as a President or do we need a true statesman. Seeing the havoc wrecked by the military in last few decades around the world, my answer would be in favor of the latter option. We need a President who understands the significance of what's happening in the world around him and who is willing to make necessary adjustments to stay at peace with rest of the world. America can no longer afford to be an isolationist. Its foreign policy needs to undergo a major overhaul and its people need to be told the truth. All these are tough jobs for which Colin Powell is definitely not suitable. He may have been a great military chief and can work for organizations like the CIA and the Pentagon but when it comes to administrative affairs of the country, we need a visionary. We need someone whose courage comes from within and not from the sword he holds. Colin Powell is sadly not the man.