PEOPLE in the US certainly do not like to hear this, and I suspect many in the Philippines do not either, as entrenched as the social, political and media perspective is in the American mode of thinking, but it is impossible to fully appreciate and react effectively to the Iran-US conflict if one tries to understand it solely from the Western point of view. Taking a look at the rivalry, which has its roots in the early 1950s, from the Iranian perspective can be informative.

In order to understand the Iranian perspective, one has to understand how three factors — ethnicity, oil and religion — have shaped modern Iran’s course.