Vagueness in Progress: A linguistic and legal comparative analysis between UN and U.S. official documents and drafts relating to the second Gulf war

This paper is based on a doctoral thesis which aimed at investigating whether the use of strategic vagueness in Security Council resolutions relating to Iraq has contributed to the breakout of the 2002–2003 Gulf war instead of a diplomatic solution of the controversies. This work contains a linguistic and legal comparative analysis between UN and U.S. documents and their drafts in order to demonstrate how vagueness was deliberately added to the final versions of the documents before being passed, and thus strategically used vagueness has played a crucial role in UN resolutions related to the outbreak of war in Iraq, and in relevant legislation produced by the United States for its Congressional authorisation for war. The comparative analysis between S/RES/1441(2002) and US legislation has evidenced that there would have been diplomatic solutions to the Iraqi crises which were not synonymous of light-handed intervention against Iraq, but delib- erately vague UN wording allowed the US to build its own legislation with a personal interpretation implying that the UN did not impede military action.