Now we are engaged in a great war on terror, testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived in liberty and dedicated to the propositions of human freedom and the intrinsic dignity of an open society, can long endure. We are engaged on a great battlefield of that war in Iraq, and earlier, in Afghanistan. The brave men and women, living and dead, who struggled there, have consecrated our struggle.
The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here on these boards, but it can never forget what our fighting men and women did there. It is for us the living, rather, to rededicated ourselves to the unfinished work which they who fought have thus far so nobly advanced, to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we may take increased devotion to the cause of human freedom and democracy for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that freedom-loving Iraqis, and all our friends around the world, and most especially, our nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that governments of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
(With profound apologies to Abraham Lincoln for the appropriation of his sacred words.)