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Lt. Col. Tim Collins 20 March 2003 With one phrase, Lt. Col. Tim Collins, commander of the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish, summed up the task in hand for the British forces waiting to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq. Collins was addressing his 800 men, an arm of Britain's 16 Air Assault Brigade, at Fort Blair Mayne, a Kuwaiti desert camp 20 miles south of the Iraqi border. Here is as much of his extraordinary speech as has been reported. "We go to liberate not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering...

Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins Speech to the Royal Irish Battle Group:Imagine you are cooking in the heat and sun, as afraid as you can be, knowing you are about to fight, perhaps to kill, perhaps to die. Your commander says this: The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his Nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction. There are many regional commanders who have stains on their souls and they are stoking the fires of Hell for Saddam. As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity....

The Second Gulf War has already produced its first great work of oratory, a battlefield speech that could stand, in an unassuming way, alongside Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Churchill’s inspiring wartime rhetoric. A century hence, people will still be reading the speech written by Lieutenant-Colonel Tim Collins, the 42-year-old commander of The Royal Irish battle group, which he delivered to his troops in Kuwait on Wednesday afternoon, just hours before they went into battle. Colonel Collins has a history degree, but does not look like a poet. Readers of The Times will have seen his photograph, in shades and combat...