What He Said

Following is a partial text of the remarks by retired Gen. Colin L. Powell when he was nominated to be secretary of State:

Thank you so very much, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. President-elect and Mrs. Bush, Mr. Vice President-elect Cheney, ladies and gentlemen, citizens of Crawford, Texas.

It’s a great pleasure to be with you this afternoon, and I’m honored, honored, to be given the opportunity to return to public service as the 65th secretary of State of the United States of America.

Mr. President-elect, I thank you for the confidence that you have placed in me, and I look forward to serving you, the American people, and the cause of peace and freedom around the world.

And it is a special privilege for me to once again serve with Vice President-elect Dick Cheney. We have been through many adventures together, and many more adventures await us in the future.

Mr. President-elect, during your administration you’ll be faced with many challenges, and crises that we don’t know anything about right now will come along. But I believe that these challenges and these crises will pale in comparison to the wonderful opportunities that await us, opportunities that have been brought about by the end of the Cold War; by the spread of democracy and the free-enterprise system around the world; opportunities that come to us because we held steadfast in our belief in democracy; opportunities that will come to us because of the information technology revolutions that are reshaping the world as we know it, destroying political boundaries and all kinds of other boundaries as we are able to move information and capital data around the world at the speed of light, able to move knowledge around the world at the speed of light; opportunities that will come to us because the old world map as we knew it of a red side and a blue side, that competed for something called the Third World is gone, and the new map is a mosaic, a mosaic of many different pieces and many different colors spreading around the world, a world that has seen that communism did not work, fascism did not work, Nazism did not work.