Surveying the Battlefield: Mapping the different arguments and positions of the Iraq War debate through Frame Analysis1

Abstract

The Iraq War was a multidimensional controversy taking in issues of strategy, security, international law and morality. Building on this observation, the first part of this paper proposes a template to capture and explain the ways in which those issues played out on both sides of the argument. However for the active antagonists in the debate it was not enough to have a position on each of these concerns – they had to be woven together into a consistent and coherent narrative as they saw it. Out of this, the different schools of thought from the Neo-Conservatives to the Antiwar radicals emerged. This is the focus of the second part of this paper. By outlining the frames and the schools of thought that emerged from them, this paper proposes a model that moves us beyond the one-dimensional 'for or against' way of looking at the controversy.