David McCloskey

And I felt the same way about Assad in Syria.

And yet, I think analytically, you can fall into a trap of wanting something.

And so you say that it's going to happen, right?

And we got a lot of flack even inside the intelligence community for

kind of inside the national security establishment for kind of writing in 2011 that, well, hey, you know, like it's not inevitable.

that this regime, the al-Sadr regime collapses.

Just because they're brutal, just because they've mismanaged the country horribly, just because there's no legitimacy narrative left any longer, they still have considerable resources at their disposal and a willingness to use them.

And I see a lot of parallels with the situation in Iran today, where there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of wish casting

about the demise of this regime.

And I don't see the cracks yet in the coercive apparatus.

That's what I'm watching.

Are we starting to see any of these cracks?

Do they start to decay?

Yeah.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And that's the critical piece here.

And I just don't see it yet.

So I hope this thing changes and the Iranian people get something better out of the future than they've gotten out of the recent past with this government.

But I think as an analyst, you have to be really careful that you don't transpose your own desires onto the analysis.