ABSTRACT
This chapter will make a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the language used by the British government in the House of Commons in 2003 concerning the war in Iraq. It will fi rst comment briefl y on some of Tony Blair’s public statements on the doctrine of international law and subsequently will set out the basic principles of just-war doctrine. After a brief description of methods and materials, it will investigate whether the discourse of the government, in arguing its case to use ‘all necessary means’ to disarm Iraq to the House of Commons, contains traces of just-war theory. The fi nal section will focus on the discourse of just one member of Parliament, Claire Short, who was both a government member and a backbencher in the year under study.2
