1 A political action against popular opinion: Aznar’s final speech before the Spanish Parliament justifying the war in Iraq (December 2003) David Pujante and Esperanza Morales-López University of Valladolid/ University of A Coruña [Published in Journal of Language and Politics, 7/1 (2008)] Abstract This paper analyses the last speech delivered in the Spanish Parliament (on 2 December 2003) by President Aznar, in which he attempts to discursively uphold the reasons for his decision to support Bush’s Administration (although with a small number of troops), and prove his interpretation of events. This speech is the richest in symbolism: it was made after the end of the war and no weapons of mass destruction were found, and also because it took place several hours after the funeral service for seven Spanish intelligence agents, murdered in Iraq. Our theoretical and methodological background is an eclectic position based on different approaches such as Critical Discourse Analysis, International Sociolinguistics, and Rhetoric (mainly the theory of argumentation), among others. However, in order to analyse a particular type of discourse, it is the text itself which guides the direction of this analysis and leads us to rely to a greater or lesser extent on a specific theoretical or methodological approach. The analysis reveals that Aznar builds three ideological meanings (or frames) in order to justify his ideological positioning given the socio-political situation of the moment: 1) Terrorism currently represents a global threat of which ETA is just one of many examples; 2) The mission carried out by Spanish troops in Iraq is part of a universal mission, led by the United Nations; and 3) The Partido Popular Government has the clearest insight into our destiny as a nation, and will lead us unequivocally towards it (the return to Spanish nationalism). Keywords: Political discourse analysis, political strategies, rhetorical discourse, parliamentary discourse. “Yet the enormous effort that is war can only be prevented if peace is seen as representing an even greater effort, a system of highly complicated efforts which, in part, also requires the happy intervention of genius […]. Peace is not something that “just exists” and is there for man to enjoy. Peace is not the spontaneous fruit of any plant or tree. Nothing that is important is freely given to man; it is up to him to produce and make it. For this reason, the most obvious name for our species is that of the homo faber” (José Ortega y Gasset. 1926. La rebelión de las masas, 225. Barcelona: Círculo de Lectores, 1967). 1. Introduction. The words of one of our finest philosophers, which we have chosen to begin this paper, immediately regained their relevance following the Bush Administration’s decision to initiate a new era of international relations marked by what has been termed ‘preventive warfare’. At the time, the Spanish Government, in the hands of the Partido