When Reza Pahlavi spoke on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference this week, he did not simply criticise the Islamic Republic. He urged United States officials to embrace something far more consequential: “military intervention” against Iran, framed as a humanitarian shortcut. In an interview with Reuters, he argued that an American “attack could weaken [the government] or accelerate its fall”, adding that “intervention is a way to save lives.”

For anyone writing about Iran, this moment matters precisely because it invites a principled refusal to slide into two familiar traps. The first trap blames Iran itself for the violence that foreign bombs always unleash. The second trap treats war as a neutral tool that “good people” can deploy for “good ends”. I want to argue for a third frame: opposition politics do not become noble simply because they oppose an oppressive state, and they do not become democratic simply because they use the vocabulary of freedom.

When an opposition figure asks a foreign power to strike his own country, he crosses a moral and political line that should alarm anyone who claims to stand with ordinary Iranians.

When an opposition figure asks a foreign power to strike his own country, he crosses a moral and political line that should alarm anyone who claims to stand with ordinary Iranians.

Pahlavi’s defenders might reply that he asked for intervention because he believes Iran stands “on the brink of collapse” and that a strike would “expedite the process.” But that claim produces an immediate, uncomfortable question: if collapse sits just around the corner, why invite a military blow that will predictably land on the lives and infrastructure of the people you say you want to protect? The contradiction does not require a personal attack to expose it. You can test it with the most basic standard of political responsibility: do your proposed means reliably serve your stated ends?

As an American reader, I cannot hear the phrase “save lives” attached to “intervention” without hearing an echo from my own country’s recent past. The United States has sold war to the public in exactly these terms for a generation: precision, speed, liberation, minimal harm. Yet the empirical record points in the opposite direction. The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that direct post-9/11 war violence killed over 940,000 people across key war zones, including more than 432,000 civilians. It also estimates 3.6–3.8 million indirect deaths linked to the destruction of economies, healthcare systems and infrastructure, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5–4.7 million, while noting that precise mortality remains unknown. A politics that treats war as a life-saving instrument must confront those numbers before it asks anyone else to take it on faith.

If the discussion feels abstract, Iraq offers a concrete lesson in how quickly “liberation” rhetoric collides with human reality. Iraq Body Count currently records 187,499–211,046 documented civilian deaths from violence following the 2003 invasion. These figures do not capture every death, and the organisation itself describes gaps in reporting and recording.

If the discussion feels abstract, Iraq offers a concrete lesson in how quickly “liberation” rhetoric collides with human reality. Iraq Body Count currently records 187,499–211,046 documented civilian deaths from violence following the 2003 invasion. These figures do not capture every death, and the organisation itself describes gaps in reporting and recording.

That caveat does not weaken the argument. It strengthens it: even one of the most careful public records of wartime civilian deaths does not pretend the toll sits neatly within a controllable, “surgical” box. War breaks the world it touches, and it does so in ways that planners rarely predict and politicians rarely admit.

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International law also exists for a reason: it reflects, in legal form, the bitter historical lesson that states will rationalise aggression as rescue unless the world draws bright lines.

The United Nations Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, with narrow exceptions such as self-defence after an armed attack.

The United Nations Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, with narrow exceptions such as self-defence after an armed attack.

I raise this not to pretend that law always restrains power, but to underline what Pahlavi’s appeal normalises. He asks the world to treat military force as a legitimate political instrument for shaping Iran’s internal future. Even if one believes Iran’s rulers deserve no sympathy, the principle at stake remains larger than any single government: once you invite the use of force as a tool of domestic transformation, you make every society vulnerable to the same logic when great powers decide they dislike its politics.

There is a further cost that supporters of intervention often ignore because it does not appear on a battlefield map: the propaganda dividend. Every time an opposition figure asks for foreign military action, he gives any security state an easy narrative: dissent equals foreign conspiracy. That narrative does not need to be true to do damage. It can chill participation, fracture coalitions and push peaceful politics into a corner where only the loudest and most extreme voices remain audible. In other words, calls for “intervention” do not only endanger people physically. They also risk shrinking the civic space that any genuine transition would require.

None of this requires romanticising Iran’s rulers, or insulting Iran itself. The opposite is true. To take Iranian society seriously means refusing to reduce it to a chessboard on which outsiders can “expedite” history with an airstrike. It means acknowledging that a post-war landscape rarely produces clean democratic openings. War breeds emergency rule, militia politics, revenge cycles and economic collapse, and it usually empowers the actors best equipped for violence, not the citizens best equipped for democratic repair. If you want a sober forecast of what a strike “to save lives” can create, you do not need ideology. You only need memory.

So what should a responsible opposition voice demand instead, if not bombs? The answer will not satisfy those who crave instant catharsis, but it fits the ethical requirement that politics should not wager civilian lives for rhetorical advantage. First, opposition figures should prioritise strategies that expand civic capacity rather than destroy infrastructure: support for open information flows, secure communications and independent documentation of abuses. Second, they should press for targeted legal and diplomatic accountability that isolates perpetrators without turning entire populations into collateral damage. Third, they should build coalitions that speak to ordinary people’s practical fears: not only fear of repression, but fear of chaos, fragmentation and warlordism after state rupture. These steps sound slower than “intervention”, but they respect the only durable foundation any democratic future can stand on: public legitimacy built at home.

In the end, the case against Pahlavi’s intervention talk does not rest on his name, his lineage, or his personal ambitions. It rests on a principle that Americans should understand better than most because our leaders have tested its opposite at enormous cost. War does not arrive as freedom. It arrives as fire, and then it demands more fire to manage the consequences of the first. When an opposition figure sells military intervention as a life-saving shortcut, he is not offering a plan for liberation. He is recycling the most catastrophic political marketing line of the post-9/11 era, and asking Iranians to pay the price for America’s next experiment.

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