ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how ideology may manifest itself in discourse through the use of argumentative manoeuvring strategies that can be geared to manipulate meaning construction. It describes how argumentum ad hominem and argument from pity were strategically deployed in pro-war argument in a way that provided blinkers that prevented the American–British public from viewing the Iraqi conflict from different perspectives. Operation Iraqi Freedom marked not only the US’s second incursion into Iraq in just over a decade but also an unprecedented alignment of the media with the interests of the US government. The sampled op/ed texts will be largely presented as illustrative of US–British op/ed discursive practices vis-a-vis the looming Iraq conflict. The problem, therefore, is that the media representation of the Iraq crisis reduces the conflict to a morality tale of good versus evil that requires moral denunciation.
