On Valentine's Day, Feb. 14, 2002, five months after the attacks of 9/11, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell took live questions for 90 minutes as part of an MTV global forum to 375 million viewers. It was a different world, not yet dominated by Facebook time lines, tweets or Instagram models.
The Music Television network known for Madonna's "Justify My Love" had asked the Bush administration to justify its foreign policy to young people who were questioning America's role in the world. The war in Afghanistan was already underway, but the invasion of Iraq was a year away. The first question to Powell came from a young woman in London who asked how he felt about representing a country commonly perceived as "the Satan of contemporary politics."
At first bemused by the characterization, Powell rejected the characterization and said that values drove America's image in the world — democracy, economic freedom, individual rights. Quite the contrary to the Great Satan, the U.S. was the Great Protector.
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