It is hard to imagine a clearer case for action in Iraq than that articulated by President Bush last night. No doubt we will hear, between now and the vote on a war resolution in Congress, complaints from the usual suspects that the president could have offered more “evidence.” But our guess is that the framework the president gave will be more than sufficient to gain him the authority he is asking Congress to provide under Article I of the Constitution.

During the speech we were struck not only the president’s outline of the vast nature of the threat posed by Saddam’s regime — the chemical and biological weapons, the work on a nuclear bomb, the oppression of his own people, the attacks on the Kurds and Kuwaitis, the threat to Israel and the rest of the Middle East, and the involvement of Iraq after the fact in harboring those who participated in the attacks on America of September 11.

We were also struck by the president’s decision to include in the casus belli the murder of a single New Yorker a generation ago. The president didn’t mention Leon Klinghoffer by name. But he did mention by name the terrorist who launched the operation that seized the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, on the deck of which Palestinian terrorists shot Klinghoffer, although he was confined to a wheel chair, and pushed him into the Mediterranean Sea. “Iraq,” the president said, “has also provided safe haven to Abu Abbas, who was responsible for seizing the Achille Lauro and killing an American passenger.”

When parents sit down with their children after having gathered around their radio and television sets and listened to the leader of the free world lay out the case for opening a new theater in a burgeoning world war, they will find themselves marveling at this fact. A generation after a terrorist whose henchmen pushed a wheel-chair bound American tourist into the sea from the deck of a cruise liner, one of the reasons, if only one, that America is going to go to war with a country is because that country gave that terrorist a haven.

Try to conjure the puzzlement that must ripple across the brows of the high and mighty around the world — the Red Chinese mandarins in the Great Hall of the people, the veterans of the KGB ensconced in the Kremlin, the kings and princes in their palaces in Arabia, and even the swallowtailed Frenchmen in the Quai D’Orsay — as they try to remember the name of Leon Klinghoffer. It is something to imagine them looking at one another and gulping, “This is what this war is about?”

They and we will understand that America is not going to war over the murder of a single individual. It has held its fire under countless provocations from a host of countries and Is lamist extremists. Mr. Bush is asking for authority to go to war with Iraq because it is, as the president noted, unique in its threatening nature and because waiting will only permit the threat to grow. Mr. Bush’s declaration that “we refuse to live in fear” will be remembered for years. It will be remembered as an articulation of American values. And so will the fact that when the great battle of his time was joined the president made a point of the murder of a single New Yorker whose killers are still at large.