The President's speech was magnificent. I'm not sure to what it compares. Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech, or Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech come to mind, but fall short.
If those speeches were perhaps more poetic, it's because poetry wasn't called for today. This was not a speech whose principle aim was to be memorable or inspiring, though it will be. Today's aim was force immediate, specific and unequivocal action on the part of both the United Nations and Iraq, and to gird America for the consequences either way.
Today's speech was like a legal brief, but a legal brief like artillery, designed to obliterate every wall of resistance before our armor rolls, and to leave the sympathizers with Saddam no platform for complaint when it does. That Iraq will ultimately resist is not in doubt, for in the grip of his megalomania, Saddam Hussein is pathologically unable to embrace any fate other than the fiery phantom of his idol, Nebuchadnezzar, and unable to lead Iraq to any destiny other than ruin.
President Bush has now given the United Nations a choice as a body: relevance or oblivion.
Either way, our armor will roll.
