David McCloskey

You can look and we had been, you know, as Middle East analysts, like we all had an understanding of the deep problems that most of these governments had and the fact that if you had gone through, as we had actually, we had done a pillars exercise because by this point in the CIA era,

basically every country team was doing something similar and looking at whatever authoritarian regime they were covering and saying, well, what are the pillars of stability here?

And where are they at?

And do we see signposts of any of these things weakening?

So we had done that exercise on Syria, actually, I think maybe six to 12 months prior to the protests breaking out.

And

I would say we had an understanding of where those pillars were, but we didn't have an ability to forecast what was coming next, right?

Because it was just, it was a surprise.

And I distinctly remember as the protests are happening in Tunisia and Egypt, and then, you know, the Tunisian president, Ben Ali, famously flees, you know, Tunis, which that sets off another cascade because...

populations all over the Arab world look and they say, well, this could work, right?

It's that shift of that.

It's that private view shifting to become the public one.

But what was very fascinating, and it gets to kind of

you know, the anchoring bias that we all have after Ben Ali fled in, I think he left in late December of 2010.

And then in January of 2011, there were massive street protests in Cairo, famously, against Hosni Mubarak's rule.

And as we were all watching these, I remember thinking,

Everybody sat down, all these political analysts across the CIA sat down and started writing pieces that basically said,

It wasn't exactly this blunt, but it was kind of like, here's why that's not going to happen in my country.

And I remember one of my good friends was actually writing a piece about the significant hurdles to a protest movement in Cairo when protests broke out.

And then he was like, okay, well, I'm going to delete that draft.