Critical Discourse Analysis of Western Newspapers’ Articles on the Alleged Arming of Syrian Rebels and the U.S. President Barack Obama’s

This paper, based on Critical Discourse Analysis theory and structure and systemic functional linguistics, analyzes political articles of western newspapers, The Washington Post and The Guardian, and Barack Obama’s speech on the Syrian issue of arming the rebel groups mainly from modality perspective. The paper uses modality frequencies and qualitative analyses to evaluate the data. The results show that the western countries’ support towards human rights in the Syrian war has often belied their actions. Instead of active engagement in Syria, the US and UK have taken spectator role, with very limited inclination to help.