David McCloskey

So that's another potential parallel.

Right, right.

And then, you know, Syria also had widespread kind of socioeconomic problems, mass youth unemployment, housing crisis.

There had been mass internal migration from a drought in the east.

So you had these kind of

big socioeconomic problems, right, that the regime in Syria was incapable of solving.

And I think, you know, here in Iran, we have similar parallels where you just the level of sort of mismanagement and corruption has led to a situation where that socioeconomic contract

between the regime and the people has really frayed.

Also in Syria, you had a regime whose revolutionary institutions had totally decayed and whose legitimacy narrative was really quite weak.

The most important, quote unquote, political party in Syria in 2011 was the Ba'ath Party.

And regime officials at the time were

They were kind of surprised and probably shouldn't have been to see just how hollowed out the thing had become.

I mean, nobody believed in this kind of Assadist Arab nationalist ideology anymore.

It was just totally hollowed out.

And I think similarly, you know, with Iran today, as we discussed in the last episode, you know, this kind of legitimacy narrative for the Islamic Republic has really weakened.

Well, and then elites in Syria...

at least initially, fairly cohesive, I would say.

And so were the regime's military and security services.

And in particular, the units that were responsible for regime protection, the more elite pieces of the military, most of the intelligence agencies, they just, there really weren't significant defections or instances where you had orders disobeyed to fire on protesters and to go after armed opposition.

And I think so far, that's what we're seeing in Iran.