Who Was Fighting and Who/What Was Being Fought? The Construction of Participants' Identities in UK and US Reporting of the Iraq War

This study addresses the media reporting of the conflict in Iraq in 2003 and analyses the linguistic representation of the participants in the war. As Fowler (1991: 4) states, “[t]here are always different ways of saying the same thing, and they are not random, accidental alterna- tives. Differences in expression carry ideological distinctions (and thus differences in representation)”. Our aim is to identify such differences in expression and to describe how they were used to construe various participants in the UK press over a specific period, on the basis of the theoretical assumption that, as social identities are enacted in discourse, they can be uncovered through discourse analysis. From the analysis we conclude that the reporting of this war was characterised by vagueness regarding the enemy, which appears as a one dimensional and under-defined Other in the metaphorical war on terror.