We will succeed in the Gulf.  And when we do, the world community will have sent an enduring warning to any dictator or despot, present or future, who contemplates outlaw aggression.

The world can therefore seize this opportunity to fulfill the long-held promise of a new world order—­where brutality will go unrewarded, and aggression will meet collective resistance.

Yes, the United States bears a major share of leadership in this effort.  Among the nations of the world, only the United States of America has had both the moral standing, and the means to back it up.  We are the only nation on this earth that could assemble the forces of peace.

This is the burden of leadership—­and the strength that has made America the beacon of freedom in a searching world.

This nation has never found glory in war.  Our people have never wanted to abandon the blessings of home and work, for distant lands and deadly conflict.  If we fight in anger, it is only because we have to fight at all.  And all of us yearn for a world where we will never have to fight again.

Each of us will measure, within ourselves, the value of this great struggle.  Any cost in lives is beyond our power to measure.  But the cost of closing our eyes to aggression is beyond mankind’s power to imagine.

This we do know:  Our cause is just.  Our cause is moral.  Our cause is right.

Let future generations understand the burden and the blessings of freedom.  Let them say, we stood where duty required us to stand.

Let them know that together, we affirmed America, and the world, as a community of conscience.

The winds of change are with us now.  The forces of freedom are united.  We move toward the next century, more confident than ever, that we have the will at home and abroad, to do what must be done—­the hard work of freedom.

May God bless the United States of America.

***

State of the Union Address
George H.W.  Bush
January 28, 1992

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, distinguished members of Congress, honored guests and fellow citizens: 

I mean to speak tonight of big things, of big changes and the promises they hold and of some big problems and how together we can solve them and move our country forward as the undisputed leader of the age.

We gather tonight at a dramatic and deeply promising time in our history, and in the history of man on earth.  For in the past 12 months, the world has known changes of almost biblical proportions.  And even now, months after the failed coup that doomed a failed system, I am not sure we have absorbed the full impact, the full import of what happened.