With the streets of Baghdad once again shattered by the strafing of United States planes, George Bush this evening will announce his response to the situation in Iraq.
The world saw in the November elections the American people say "Enough!" They wanted an end to the rhetoric of the previous few years of shock and awe. They wanted an end to defining justice as the exercise of military might that turned into a nightmare of the dead and maimed. A stop to endless pictures of men, women and children, of both military and civilians, lying amongst the shattered ruins of buildings in cities that once were the most beautiful in the Middle East.
Yes, the world saw the American people say "Enough!"
I do not believe that this rejection was simply what some on the right paint it, an intolerance of the death of three thousand of their own. The American people have stood proud and made far greater sacrifices in their history in the name of freedom, justice and democracy. My own country knows this and those neocons who talk of a nation that has lost its will, and no longer has the ability to outlast the determination of their enemies, are not patriots. They do not love their country, as they have no respect for its people. They do not understand that the revulsion is for all the deaths, the deaths of all those innocents from their own country and of those in other countries who have suffered at the hands of the cynical exploiters of the grief of a nation in the aftermath of 9/11.
Tonight, George Bush will tell the world a lie. He will tell them that the American people voted in November not for peace but for victory. He will commit more of the young men and women of the country he is supposed to protect to pursue an objective that only he understands and only he wants.
This is the greatest of his lies. This lie is not about what another dictator in another country had or had not in his arsenal of weapons or intended or did not intend to do with them. This is a lie about the nature of his own people. It is a lie about what is in their hearts, a lie about what they want for their lives and the lives of others.
We have spent the last few weeks looking at what Congress can do to oppose the madness of this age. We have read every word and statement coming from the Democratic Party. We have despised the words of Lieberman, been encouraged by the statements of Pelosi and Reid. We have cheered the hard and brutally frank analysis and determination of Kennedy.
As the banal words of George W Bush this evening come to a stuttering end, however, it is not to a political party that the rest of the world will look but to the American people. It is they who must, in the finality, stand together and say that this claimed thirst of theirs for a victory that covers their flag in the blood of nations is a lie. A lie about them that is the cruellest, most deceitful of all that has been expressed in their name by a failed President of a failed administration that gained power by sleight of hand and expectations that were no more than the cloak of the lies that have spewed forth ever since .
After tonight, we want Congress to act with great strength. Yet it is the American people who will tell them, tell the media and tell us, the rest of the world looking on in hope, that this time George Bush does not speak for them.