'Just War' or just 'war: Arguments for Doing the 'Right Thing'

The chapter makes a linguistic analysis of the discourse of the House of Commons proceedings relating to the Iraq war, with particular reference to speeches and interventions made by members of the government. Methodologically, it combines corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Haarman, Morley, Partington, 2003, Bayley 2004, 2005, Miller 2006) with appraisal analysis (Martin & White 2005, White 2002, 2003, Martin & Rose 2003, Martin 2000), and involves both quantitative analysis of corpus data and qualitative analysis of texts. The chapter compares and contrasts the government’s positioning on war with that of Clare Short, a dissenting Labour MP who did vote with the government on March 18th but subsequently resigned her cabinet-level position as Secretary of State for International Development on 12th May 2003 in protest over the war. It first makes a analysis of the discourse of members of the British government, as they sought to justify and legitimate military action in the House of Commons in 2003, drawing on the House of Commons sub-section of the CorDis corpus, in order to investigate the extent to which their arguments corresponded with, or diverged from, notions of just war. It subsequently investigates Clare Short’s positioning on the war in Iraq in 2003 as it emerges from the analysis of the same corpus, tracing her arguments chronologically from when she was a member of the government to her position after her resignation. Chouliaraki (2005) has argued that the quest for legitimacy and credibility in the justification to enter the war in Iraq was strongly motivated by the “humanitarian argument”; or, in other words, to liberate the Iraqi people from dictatorship. We claim that the humanitarian argument was largely absent in the discourse of the government while it was foregrounded and recontextualised in the discourse of Clare Short.