DONALD Trump’s call for Iranians to “take over” their government and Benjamin Netanyahu’s appeal for the Iranian people to “take their destiny into their own hands” have accompanied recent military strikes presented in the name of collective self-defence and civilian protection.
Keir Starmer’s decision to permit the use of British bases for US strikes on Iranian missile infrastructure has been framed in similar terms. Strategic escalation begins to appear not as a policy choice, but as a moral response.
This language is familiar. Much of the vocabulary used to legitimise military intervention, including humanitarian protection, civilian defence and the “war on terror”, emerged within Western security doctrine after 9/11, drawing on counterinsurgency practices developed during the late colonial and Cold War periods.
Claims to protect or liberate do more than describe military action; they help normalise its use. Language does not merely accompany intervention; it lowers the political threshold at which it becomes possible.
How persuasive this language sounds depends on how the targeted political order has already been framed.
Our view of leaders such as Ayatollah Khomeini is filtered through the narratives available to us. When political authority grounded in religious legitimacy exists within Western-aligned states, it is often treated as tradition or history. Comparable arrangements in Muslim-majority contexts, by contrast, are more readily described as authoritarian, repressive or regressive.
These asymmetries matter. Political systems already framed as irrational or unstable are more easily cast as fit for external intervention.
Disliking a government does not mean its people want it bombed from abroad, and criticism of state policy does not authorise external powers to decide, through military force, what liberation should look like on that population’s behalf.
Yet once a state’s legitimacy has been publicly undermined, the use of force against it becomes easier to present as necessary rather than discretionary.
Interventions launched in the name of protection have offered cautionary examples before. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was justified in part on the grounds that removing Saddam Hussein would create the conditions for a more just political order.
The regime was indeed overthrown. What followed was the fragmentation of state institutions, sectarian violence, mass displacement and the deaths of large numbers of civilians. Iraq did not emerge from this intervention as a stable liberal democracy, but as a state struggling to rebuild its institutions under conditions of prolonged insecurity.
The 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya was similarly undertaken under the banner of civilian protection. Its immediate objective may have been achieved.
The longer-term result, however, was the collapse of central authority, prolonged civil conflict and the emergence of militia rule across significant parts of the country. More than a decade later, Libya remains politically fragmented.
Iran’s situation is not identical. The pattern, however, is familiar. Military force justified in protective terms does not reliably produce humanitarian outcomes.
Reports from southern Iran indicate that recent missile strikes have damaged civilian infrastructure, including a girls’ primary school in Minab. This is what “liberation” can look like in practice when military force is framed in protective terms.
You do not protect people by bombing their schools. Calling it humanitarian does not change what happens when classrooms are destroyed with students inside them.
As escalation continues, the risks extend beyond direct strikes on civilian sites. In armed conflict, infrastructure frequently becomes a secondary battlefield. Power grids, transport networks and water treatment facilities are treated as legitimate targets because they sustain a state’s capacity to govern.
Yet these same systems also sustain civilian life. Hospitals do not function without electricity. Food distribution depends on intact transport routes. Clean water requires operational treatment plants. The humanitarian effects that follow their destruction are often predictable consequences of war rather than unfortunate accidents.
Economic sanctions already illustrate this dynamic. While intended to pressure governing elites, they frequently affect currency stability, import capacity and the availability of essential goods. Military escalation would amplify these pressures by introducing physical destruction alongside financial constraint.
Framing intervention as humanitarian necessity also reshapes democratic accountability at home. When military action is justified as a means of preventing harm rather than advancing national interest, opposition becomes more difficult to articulate without appearing indifferent to civilian suffering.
Parliamentary scrutiny, public protest or diplomatic restraint may be recast as inaction in the face of imminent danger. In this way, the framing of protection not only legitimates force abroad but also constrains debate about its use domestically.
War does not become publicly acceptable through force alone, but through the narratives that precede it. The repeated pairing of escalation with the language of defence, protection or liberation helps to limit the range of politically viable alternatives.
War begins to appear not as one policy option among many, but as the responsible course of action available to any state that wishes to prevent harm.
Wars are rarely sold to the public as strategic; they are sold as necessary. By the time escalation is presented as the ethical response to crisis, it has often already been framed as the only responsible one.
Liberation cannot be delivered by those who claim the right to decide, from afar and by force, what freedom should cost.
Dr Siti Nurnadilla Mohamad Jamil is a linguist and discourse analyst whose research focuses on language, ideology, and the legitimisation of violence in media and political discourse. She is currently a Visiting Researcher at Lancaster University and an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the International Islamic University Malaysia. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Sinar Daily.