your day job, acting, you can tell us about what you are doing right now. >> i did a film with wes anderson who's one of my favorite film makers. he made films like rush mor and tannenbaum. and the next bourn film now. >> that will be very exciting. >> tonight fighting words for barack obama from one of america's top military men. >> sometimes with congress you simply have to let them have it between the eyes and drag them in your direction and not think you can talk them into your direction. >> colin powell on what's wrong with washington. >> what troubles me the most is i've never seen such polarization in our political process. >> this veterans day eve, the cause close to his hearts, the veterans. >> i want to tell my fellow americans every day is a veterans day.

>> that is the summation of what's wrong. >> colin powell for the hour. this is piers morgan tonight. >> for many americans colin powell is still the face of the modern military, retired four-star general, the only african american to serve on the joint chiefs of staff and the secretary of state to george w. bush. he's here to talk about a cause close to his heart, the state of america's military veterans. general colin powell joins me now. thank you for welcoming me to this extraordinary building. >> thank you. >> we're in the national war college. you were here 35 years ago.

>> i graduated 35 years ago. that's hard to believe. we had our 35th anniversary. it has a great deal of meaning for all of us. >> when you were here as a young, fresh-faced colin powell, what was the big thing for you. >> i was doing well in the army, but i had no idea what the army had in store pe for me. i was here with a group of army officers and state officers as well as air force officers. surprisingly we all had a great time and had a lot of fun and learned a lot. then some 15 years later a number of us came back together to fight the first gulf war. about five of my classmates were now three and four-star generals, and i knew them. i'd known them for 16 years. so we were able to put a team together that was able to fight the war rather well. >> that's extraordinary. >> yeah, yeah. i learned a lot here. it was a point in my career where i was a successful

battalion commander in korea, and now the military was trying to expand our horizons, learn more about politics, learn more about economics, about international relations about your allies so we can use you at a higher level in the organization. quite a few of my classmates mid admiral or general. >> the world has changed dramatically and it's changing super fast this year. it's remarkable what's going on. i'll come to some of that later. you as we sit here on veterans day in particular, what do you feel about the view of the modern american mill father? >> it's a great military. it's an all-volunteer force. it represents a relatively small percentage of our population, of course. i'm so proud of them. tom brokaw and i talk all the time about military service, and tom wrote that great book, "the greatest generation," talking about the world war ii generation. we've chatted about this and america is blessed to have that

kind of greatness in every generation. there is no generation that is any greater than the current generation of gis in iraq and afghanistan and so many places around the world willing to give their lives in the causes of freedom and in the cause of giving people a better opportunity for a better life for themselves, their country and their children. we should be so proud of them. that's why we celebrate veterans day. you know the oor engine of veterans day. 11-11-11. it comes from world war i. it used to be called armstats day -- >> we still have that in britain. >> this place means a lot to me. we talk about the fact that everybody says we have all these difficulties now, all these troubled times. when i came here as a student in 1975 to graduate in the buy centennial class, our 200th anniversary in 1976, think what the world was like then? it was still a soviet union.

china was emerging from the culture revolution. america passed through a difficult time. and we had a post-vietnam period and we had the counterculture going on. martin luther king had been killed a few years earlier. people thought america was down and out. then we recaptured our spirit and the values that made this country great. i like to give credit to president ford who came in and sort of stabilized us again, reminded us who we were. a few years later the soviet union was gone. we were still here. >> do you see parallels between that period and what's happening now with america. do you feel you need another gerald ford intervention? >> somebody will show up. america has always gone through these periods of difficulty of inspection when our economy is not doing well, and we're in a recession and we're a little

unsure of who we are and what we are. what i'm absolutely convinced of because of my reading of history and my living through this history is we will find our way. we've always had problems. most of my time period is spent out in the countryside giving speeches and talking to people. the kind of sort of black thinking and talking that you see on television or you hear here in washington or in congress but i see such continuing confidence and opt mitch out with the public. they just want to see the political system in washington start to reflect their concerns and start to fix itself. as i say to my audiences, don't wait for superman if you don't like how they're doing it, vote them out. >> there's a fascinating charge over there, colin powell's rules. which of these -- i read a few earlier to myself. get mad and get over it. remain calm. be kind. have a vision.

be demanding. very positive. very realistic, i felt. it wasn't saccharin at all. it was acknowledging there would be difficult times but encouraging people to, i think, think in a positive way to goit of it rather than dwell on negativity. very much for the time we're in now. if you were president and many wish you had run for the highest office, what needs to be done now? what advice -- let's not be to patronizing of barack obama. what advice would you give him to get america back on its feet right now in the modern world? >> you can't put it all on one individual. we need to take a deep breath and correct ourselves. one of the things that troubles me the most and i've been in the town on and off for the last 30-odd years. what troubles me the most is i've never seen much paul larization in our political situation. i've never seen a situation where you have people on the far left and far right who focus on their own extreme positions and hold these as theological

positions that can't be amoved away from and changed and everybody is measured against these extremes. you know, our founding fathers also had strong beliefs and believed in extremes. and they were able in philadelphia in writing our constitution to compromise slavery. i don't like the compromise we made at the time because we kept slavery, but they said we're here to form a nation. it's not happening now because it's been made too difficult. a lot of the politicians might be toward the middle by signing agreements that i won't pay taxes that pledge themselves to positions that don't led themselves to compromise. i have to say, piers, under the current media environment that didn't exist 35 years ago or 40

years ago, it is constant, nonstop commentary all day long, all evening long. you are no exception to this, i might add. >> blame me, are you? >> i'm not blaming you. i'm saying it changed the environment. if you say anything that seems to drift off the orthodoxy of your party's position, you hear about it immediately either on a cable talk show or on the bloggers or on the internet. you're going to have to deal with the two sides. the two parties don't have the same opportunity to work quietly with each other. >> you're a military man, one of the fine estrogens this country has ever produced. this is relentless to bombardment and keep coming at you. everything you do is blown up. exactly the argument you used to me about the media. you dust yourself down and call your men together and say they

want a war, let's go to war, boys. you'd work out a way to win. the argument people have with barack obama who you supported is he hasn't done enough of that. he hasn't fought back against the modern weapon, which is multimedia, the internet, all these things. he hasn't beaten his chest and behaved like you had in a battlefield. >> that's a fair criticism of the president. he is somebody who was used to getting people to compromise and seeing if we could not quietly find a way in almost a lawyerly manner. he still has that spark and enthusiasm about the country and his job that got him elected in the first place. in recent weeks we see him start to show that spark more publicly, and i've had conversations with the president over time. sometimes with congress you simply have to let them have it between the eyes and drag them in your direction and not think you can talk them into your

direction. >> i wouldn't have him on a golf course with john boehner after what he did. i'd have him in a boxing ring. mr. speaker, you want to fight about this, your people is not going to do anything to get any bill passed here at all, let's have it out properly. >> well, that's an approach that can be taken. >> would you take that approach? >> i don't play golf, so i wouldn't have got on the golf course. at some point you have to say, okay, look, we've talked enough about this. this is very military. it's now time to go out and as we say in all of our mafia movies, go to the mattresses. we will fight on this line all summer line. >> go to the mattresses? can you clarify that? >> you haven't heard that before? it means hide in your bunker so people can't get to you, and then come out and fight in the

streets. essentially, go to the mattresses. you put mattresses on a floor and sleep in a protected area and come out and fight it out. >> fantastic. let's take a sthort break. when we come back we need to know more about the mattress attack you've orchestrated and mapped out for the president.

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i think he's a transformational figure. he's a new generation coming onto the world stanl, onto the american stage. for that reason i'll be voting for senator barack obama. >> i have my special guest, general colin powell. we left it with go to your mattresses and prepare for war, which i loved. you endorsed as we heard there president obama in october 2008. it was a controversial decision. it wasn't expected at all. you're a republican, and you come out for obama. remind me of your thinking in that moment. >> before i do that, let me say that with going to the mattresses, that's with both parties. deal with your own party. do your party to do what you think they should do, and then you can take on the other party and have your forces in alignment.

in 2008 i look carefully at the situation the country was in in the verge of an economic collapse that occurred later on that year. i looked at what i thought the country needed, and after listening carefully to senator mccain i've known for 30 years and also president obama and then senator obama, i came to the conclusion that he was better able to deal with the challenges they were facing economically and with respect to rejuvenating the spirit of the country and with respect to making a generational change. >> obviously, it carried a lot of weight and barack obama got elected. several prominent people were very helpful to him at the very least. when you look at him now, what do you think has happened to barack obama after three years of presidency? what do you think you should be advising him as someone that supported him about how to go

back into the election fray? >> the advice i give to the president, which i still do on occasion, i keep private. i don't share a lot of my conversations with him or his conversations with me. i think he is still the same person that we saw in 2008. he is a deliberate individual. he studies the issues before him. then he makes decisions, and many of his decisions i think have been quite sound. the financial system put back in a stable basis. some are now complaining too stable. they're going back to what they were doing before that caused this trouble. i think he's following through a correct way with respect to iraq and afghanistan and specially implementing some of the policies of president bush, former president bush. in some of the controversial things where people thought he would simply move away from some of the bush positions, he's adopted them. he's demonstrated a degree of adabtability, but at the same time the economy has not improved for the benefit of many

americans who are on the unemployment rolls, and there is a malaise within the country about when is the economy going to start creating all the jobs that we need. there is also, i think, a problem that the president has with the business community. this one is a little harder to explain, because the business community, especially at the high end, is doing rather well. but he has not succeeded in convincing them that he has all the right solutions. as i go around i find that the business community is still quite upset with his policies. they feel that the regulations that are coming down, whether it's on financial services or consumers or environmental protection agency or the obama care as its called, they are uncertainly as to what all these regulations will do them and they're hesitant to make investments so they're not sure how to plan ahead. above all, he has to work hard and do everything he can, and i

think he's pursuing this very aggressively now to create jobs for the people who don't have jobs. >> on the tick box of his score sheet, some stunning successes in terms of foreign policy many would argue getting bin laden. for you personally, you were at the start of that mission. where were you when you heard that bin laden had been killed? >> i was in my home, and i heard the news. i was absolutely delighted. this terrible person, and it was a marvelous military operation with the possibility of something going really bad. >> very awe addition yus. >> very bold. that's the kind of young men and women we have. these folks are really, really good. >> did you admire the president for the shear awe das city of the decision-making of that? >> you have to. he could have decided to go about it a different way but he told the bold action. a week later everyone wanted to talk about the unemployment problem again. we've seen a lot of evil people sent off to the hereafter in recent weeks, and that's good.

the president should get credit for it. not just because he's the commander in chief, but, you know, which is parts of it, but we have to give credit to the intelligence and military and other agencies of our government that created the conditions that allow you to go after the people. >> as somebody who was seen to be one of the more skeptic members of george bush's inner team when it came to decision-making in iraq in particular, when you see what happened in libya, when you see the back seat that america took, particularly with troops on the ground, when you see no loss of life for american servicemen compared to the 4,500 that lost their lives in iraq, what do you feel about the overall picture, the strategy that was adopted to get rid of saddam in contrast to the strategy adopted to get rid of gadhafi? the huge difference in cost not just in human life but financially to america?

>> i don't think the two can be that easily compared. we had a government in iraq that was every bit as bad as the government in libya. i remember so many western leaders in the united states were working with mr. gadhafi. in libya we didn't have the army or military force that saddam hussein had access to. you didn't have that kind of leadership coming from the europeans in iraq that we had in libya. but setting it aside, the president bush felt we tried the u.n. we didn't get satisfaction with respect to to hussein's weapons of mass destruction programs. our intelligence had it wrong, and i presented that intelligence to the united states people and the american people and to the world. it was wrong. nevertheless, we went in and got rid of a person who would have gone back to developing these

weapons of mass destruction in my humble judgment if he had been released from u.n. sanctions. i was hoping that the u.n. would work. i persuaded the president to go to the u.n., see if we can resolve it that way. if we can avoid this war and satisfy our problem with weapons of mass destruction, we should do that. but he had to make the decision, along with mr. blair and other western leaders. so we went in, and we took out the regime. my big disappointment -- i fully supported that. my big disappointment is i don't think we were as efficient as we could have. we should have put more force in there so we could have taken control of the country at the beginning, which what i think the iraqi people would think we would do. an insurgency broke out. >> when you ever see footage of you selling that war with the intelligence, what do you feel? do you feel that you were in

some way used? >> no. i had the same information, the same intelligence material that was given to the united states congress. the congress voted overwhelmingly to use military force if it came to that, and they did that three months before my presentation. everything that was in that presentation of mine was international intelligence estimate that the president used in the state of the union earlier speeches that secretary rumsfeld was using, our generals were using. they were planning against this intelligence. we thought it was solid, even though it was very inferential, we thought it was good intelligence. >> when you realized -- >> when i realized that a large part of it -- not all of it, but a considerable part of it was wrong and we should have known it was wrong, i felt terrible. i felt disappointed. it was wrong. that is the summation of it. it was wrong. >> let's take a little break and come back and talk republican

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to lead this effort at this unique moment in history, i picked a unique leader. many times over the past four

decades, america has called on colin powell and each time he has answered the call. >> that was colin powell. general, let's talk about the republican field, because it's been up and down, roller coaster, five people in the front run and fallen away. mitt romney appears to be the stable eddie the group, but even he isn't guaranteed to win it. what do you make of it all? >> it's a remarkable democratic system we have. i think it's fascinating to watch all of these individuals step forward and put themselves in the spotlight, take on the risks of political competition, and some will prevail and some won't prevail. at the end of the day only one prevails. some came on the scene quickly and dropped off. i'm watching it very, very closely with great interest. i know all of candidates. >> are you watching it as a democrat or republican? >> i'm watching it as an

american. i am a republican, but i have a variety of views. throughout my whole career and for most of the life i wasn't in any party because i was a career military officer. only since 1995 i identified myself as a republican. since 1995 i have voted for republicans and i have voted for a democrat. what i always tried to do is to do the best job of analyzing the needs of the country and the candidates that are before us and trying to support the candidate who i feel will do the best for the country, whether he is a democrat or republican or whether she is a democrat or republican. >> if the election was tomorrow, and it will be in a year, would you vote for barack obama as things stand again? >> i would never make that decision now. i didn't make that decision in 2008 until it was relatively close, and i had concluded that in my judgment anyway he was the best choice. i talked to both he and senator