You'll read the whole thing anyway, but here's the bit that stuck in my brain:

Then came the Foreign Affairs portion. Obligatory command to North Korea: down. Sit. Stay. (Pity we can’t yet say “Roll over.” ) A surprising turn on Iran: instead of casting the entire nation as a monolithic block o ‘ evil, this time he spoke to the people and said we’re on your side.

Take that for what it’s worth; talk is cheap, and we said that to some people after the last Gulf War, too. But. Imagine you're a young man in Iran, squirreled away in a basement, listening to the speech with your friends - I think I’d be thunderstruck. The Americans are coming - granted, they’ll be moving in next door, but that’s going to change everything. There’s a chance that five years from now they can all watch the Matrix trilogy without drawing the drapes and stationing one guy outside to watch for the cops.

And then this:

Last year we had more words than precision-guided munitions. Last year he had to lead people to the edge of the bonfire. This year he has to tell us to stand closer. It’s going to get hot. Don’t flinch. You can either pump up the crowd and get the blood boiling so we whoop like war-maddened orcs and hurl ourselves into the flames - but the Europeans et al get bent out of shape whenever he jabs fingers or speaks passionately. Okay, here’s the situation. Just the facts, m’seiur.

The bottom line, in any case, was that war is virtually certain. But this was not an attempt to make us slather on the warpaint, light our beards on fire and berserk our way through the region. The message wasn’t “We’re going.” The message was phrased in terms of the plight of the Iraqi people, and it was this: we’re coming. It was intended as a reassurance.

That, modern lefty nonsense aside, is the heart of American foriegn policy. And unlike European policy, our heart is backed up by muscle.