THE EXIGENCE IRAQ WAR IN TONY BLAIR’S SPEECH TO THE LABOUR PARTY: AN ANALYSIS

Abstract

This paper aims at analyzing the Iraq War exigence in the speech of Tony Blair at the Annual Labour Party Conference 2003, after the allies’ failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as well as to discuss the way Blair dealt with that to try to persuade his audience he was right in going to war. The analysis is performed through the Transitivity system of the Systemic Functional Grammar of Halliday and Matthiessen (2004). The analysis of the processes used reveals that Blair was not able to produce a plausible explanation for his decision to attack Iraq.