When I first started on philosophising on strategy a small but very interesting book caught my attention. It is called “The art of war” by Sun Tzu, a Chinese general in the ancient times. It has a lot of hard-won, real life experience with war by the great ancient general.

One of his basic maxims is his understanding of the psychological importance of warfare.

It is written, that in order to win a war, you have to know yourself but off cause more importantly, you have to know your enemy.

So this is the psychology of war, knowing your own mindset in opposition to the mindset of your opponent.

Now who are we here in the West. First of all, at the most basic level, we are vikings. This mentality when it comes to warfare is savage, extremely violent and very, very strong. This is essentially why we rule the world.

On top of this, there is a layer of Roman virtue. That is the values of the Roman empire that was so strong in Germany, France and the UK.

It calls for disciplin but also, as Roman culture was very influenced by greek culture, for Democracy and human rights.

So in fact, we ourselves are a mix of Viking spirit and Roman spirit.

At the other hand, our adversary; the Iranians is a very different culture.

The Iranians or the Persians as they call themselves as a people are an ancient civilisation.

Over many millennia Persia has developed cultural traits that are superb. The first philosopher of Persia, that of Zoroaster was the inventor of the idea of goodness.

This idea is still extremely prevalent in the Iranian culture. They despise all that smells of evil.

This is the reason they are so angry with us. Because we are not really interested in ethics that much. We are much more interested in Freedom.

This cultural background to the conflict is really what it is all about. The Iranians are angry with us, for what they see as evil, we are angry with them for what we see as a lack of freedom.

But, and that is really where it meets a possibility of peace; none of us are really interested in a full scale international war.

This is where we should understand, that neither of us are really evil. We just see things from a different perspective.

Not to say, that we should just accept each others negative behaviour, but understanding each other is point of departure in peacemaking.

G-d bless the good deeds, the good thoughts, and the good actions that we may find.