Why every war sounds the same

Western governments often frame military intervention as a duty to protect democracy, stability or human rights. But these narratives shape how conflicts are understood long before the first policy decision is made. When intervention is consistently presented as moral and defensive, it becomes difficult to question the power structures that produce it.

Sitting in the hairdresser's the other day, I realised I had left my book at home. With nothing to distract me, I found myself listening to the conversations happening around me. Two people nearby were discussing the escalating conflict with Iran.

They spoke about “us” – by which they clearly meant the West – having to defend our allies and protect people in the region from the “baddies”. Iran was framed as an unpredictable aggressor. Britain and the United States were framed as reluctant defenders stepping in to stabilise the situation and protect the innocent.

It was a familiar script. The assumption that Western countries intervene reluctantly but necessarily. That force is sometimes required in order to defend democracy, human rights or international stability. That those on the other side of these conflicts represent something irrational, dangerous or backward.

Listening to the conversation, I was struck less by what they were saying than by how familiar the language sounded. The facts of the situation had almost entirely disappeared. What remained was a moral story about the West’s role in the world.

For those of us born around the turn of the millennium, war has been a constant background presence in political life. I was born in 2000, just before the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the beginning of what became known as the War on Terror. Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya formed the geopolitical backdrop of my childhood and adolescence.

These conflicts were rarely presented simply as struggles over power, influence or strategic interests. Instead, they were framed as moral missions. Western democracies were portrayed as intervening in unstable or oppressive regions in order to defend human rights, promote democracy or protect vulnerable populations. Military force, when it occurred, was explained as tragic but necessary.

The cultural messaging reinforced this narrative. War films dominated cinema screens. Military recruitment campaigns presented service as honourable and heroic. News broadcasts regularly reported on British soldiers fighting overseas in the name of security and freedom. The message was rarely subtle: we were the good actors in a dangerous world.

For many people growing up in this period, this narrative went largely unquestioned. It was simply the political atmosphere we breathed. Britain and the United States were understood to be fundamentally different from the regimes they opposed. Where others pursued domination or repression, we intervened to defend universal values.

My own understanding of this began to shift during my final years of school after watching the coverage of airstrikes in Syria that killed large numbers of civilians while being justified by Western governments as necessary security operations against terrorism. Later, during my law degree, I studied the international prohibition on torture and inhuman or degrading treatment. Reading through legal cases arising from the War on Terror period, I encountered evidence that British forces themselves had been implicated in serious abuses against detainees and civilians.

The discovery was unsettling. The gap between the moral language used to justify intervention and the reality of what sometimes happened on the ground was difficult to ignore. The idea that Western states acted primarily as defenders of human rights became harder to sustain once confronted with the ways international legal norms were often bent or interpreted to accommodate Western strategic objectives.

During my Master’s degree in international political theory, the broader intellectual framework behind these narratives began to make more sense. As Edward Said famously argued in his work on Orientalism, Western political culture has long relied on constructing a sharp distinction between a rational, civilised “West” and an unstable, irrational “East”. The Middle East in particular has frequently been portrayed through this lens: a region defined by extremism, violence and political dysfunction.

Against that imagined backdrop, Western intervention appears not only reasonable but necessary. Military power becomes easier to justify when it is framed not as the pursuit of national interest but as a reluctant response to disorder elsewhere.

“When wars are framed primarily as struggles between good actors and bad actors, scrutiny becomes more difficult.”

Seen from this perspective, the conversation in the hairdresser’s chair was not unusual at all. It was simply the everyday reproduction of a much older story about the West’s moral authority in global politics.

What makes this framing particularly striking is how often it persists even after the consequences of past interventions have become impossible to ignore. The 2003 invasion of Iraq destabilised an entire region and contributed to the emergence of new violent actors across the Middle East. The NATO intervention in Libya in 2011 helped trigger the collapse of the Libyan state and produced a prolonged civil conflict that continues to shape regional migration and security dynamics. Two decades of military engagement in Afghanistan ended with the Taliban returning to power almost immediately after Western withdrawal.

Yet when new conflicts emerge, the language used to describe them rarely reflects these lessons. Instead, the same moral framework quickly reappears: allies under threat, dangerous regimes must be confronted, Western states called upon to defend international stability.

The emerging conflict with Iran risks being interpreted through exactly this lens.

This is despite the fact that the legal justification for recent military action is deeply questionable. Under international law, the use of force between states is prohibited except in cases of self-defence against an armed attack or when authorised by the United Nations Security Council. Neither condition clearly applies in this case.

Some American officials have attempted to justify the strikes by invoking a form of “anticipatory” or pre-emptive self-defence, arguing that Iran might have retaliated against US bases if Israel launched an attack. But this argument collapses under scrutiny. Not only does it rely on multiple layers of speculation about hypothetical future events, but it also ignores the fact that the United States was itself closely involved in planning and supporting Israel’s initial strike. In such circumstances, claiming self-defence against a chain of events one helped initiate becomes logically incoherent.

More broadly, the framing of Iran as the sole aggressor often overlooks the longer historical context of Western involvement in the country. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated a coup against Iran’s democratically elected prime minister after he nationalised the Iranian oil industry. The coup restored the rule of the Shah, whose regime received extensive Western military and intelligence support for decades. The brutality of that regime played a significant role in the revolutionary upheaval that produced the Islamic Republic in 1979.

None of this absolves the Iranian government of its own repression or regional power projection. But it complicates the simple narrative of Western states responding to irrational hostility from an inherently aggressive adversary.

Conflicts in the Middle East are rarely understood in Britain through the full complexity of their historical and geopolitical context. Instead, they are often filtered through a familiar moral narrative: responsible democratic societies confronting regimes that threaten stability and international order.

This narrative does more than simplify complex conflicts. It also shapes which questions are considered legitimate in public debate. When wars are framed primarily as struggles between good actors and bad actors, scrutiny becomes more difficult. Questions about geopolitical interests, historical responsibility or the strategic motivations behind intervention can easily be dismissed as naïve or disloyal.

The persistence of these stories is therefore politically significant. They shape public consent for military action and influence how new conflicts are interpreted before the details are even understood. The conversation I overheard in that hairdresser’s chair was therefore not really about Iran. It was about the assumptions that continue to shape how wars are understood across Britain and much of the West.

And after decades of interventions carried out in the name of stability, democracy and human rights, it may be worth asking why those assumptions remain so powerful – and whose interests they continue to serve.