Powell Couldn’t Sell a Bad Product

Re “Dearth of a Salesman,” Commentary, Nov. 18: Max Boot’s flawed premise in his complaint about outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell’s failure to sell Bush administration policies abroad is that he assumes a good salesperson could have sold those better than Powell. What Boot fails to realize is that marketers have very little success selling a bad product to well-informed consumers.

Even great salesmanship will not convince a skeptical audience that a rat is a cat when it really is just a rat. At that point, your only hope is to sway opinion with an emotional appeal. However, for that to work you must have credibility.

Michael Freeman

Los Angeles

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Isn’t it possible that Powell had trouble selling Bush policies abroad because they are wrong? Nobody could have convinced Europe to go along. Nobody could have convinced Turkey to go along. The evidence was not there, and the war is a colossal blunder. Now Powell is gone. His only mistake was not to resign earlier rather than cave to the neocon disasters in the administration. The honest members of the administration, such as Richard Clarke, at least had the integrity to let us know what was going on by resigning and following their consciences.

Now we have secretary of State nominee Condoleezza Rice, who has proven to be an articulate mouthpiece for Bush, which he clearly needs. She spent most of her time on talk shows trying to convince us that this administration knew what it was doing. I didn’t buy it then and will not in the future.

William Sweeney

Annapolis, Md.

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I don’t know why we even bother to have a State Department anymore when the military-industrial complex is calling the shots. Rice is just a figurehead, as were Powell, Madeleine Albright and Warren Christopher.

Sakae K. Okuda

Los Angeles