"Weasel Words" in Legal and Diplomatic Discourse: Vague Nouns and Phrases in UN Resolutions Relating to the Second Gulf War

This study aims at investigating vagueness in Security Council Resolutions
by focussing on a selection of nouns and phrases used as the main casus belli
for the Second Gulf War. Analysing a corpus of Security Council Resolutions
relating to the conflict, the study leads a qualitative and quantitative analysis
drawing upon Mellinkoff’s (The language of the law. Little, Brown & Company,
Boston, 1963) theories on ‘‘weasel words’’, which are ‘‘words and expressions with
a very flexible meaning, strictly dependent on context and interpretation’’. Special
attention is devoted to the historical/political consequences of such vague and
indeterminate expressions. The findings indicate that excessive vagueness might
have led to biased or even strategically-motivated interpretations of the Resolutions,
triggering the Iraqi conflict instead of a diplomatic solution. The analysis of the
‘‘weasel words’’ used in the Resolutions suggests the double-faced strength of such
expressions: though they can guaranteed a wide degree of applicability of the
Resolutions, their subjective interpretability might become a source of manipulation
and elusiveness, with the overall legislative intent of using intentional vagueness as
a political strategy.