David McCloskey

There have been little instances of that throughout the last few weeks.

But when you kind of look at have the security forces in general performed, I think the answer is that the regime has held the line, right?

And you haven't seen significant cracks in these institutions.

And maybe it's worth a little bit going to talk about the institutions because we say loyal and effective military and security services.

Well, in an authoritarian regime...

such as Iran's, and it was a very similar setup in Syria.

You'd find a similar setup in Russia or in China.

The way you run these

systems is on what I would call like a hub and spoke model.

You have number one, very large security organizations.

I mean, we're talking in the Iranian context about hundreds of thousands of people that are technically on the rolls of some of these organizations.

And all of the organizations have a bit of an overlapping mandate.

And they all watch each other.

Right.

They all spy on each other.

Yeah.

That's the thing is there's also levels inside that in the besiege, right?

So there's the people who are, you know, they get the phone call at 10 at night that, hey, we need to go out and put your leather jacket on because you're going to drive your motorcycle around and harass people.

Yeah.

But your day job is, you know, you're a bricklayer all the way up to more professional elite sort of anti-riot kind of, you know, units, right?