David McCloskey

Rip that one up.

Rip that one up.

in January and February of 2011.

And it was a country that was not experiencing unrest yet.

And I have distinct memories of sitting at restaurants and cafes and watching these protests in Egypt get bigger and bigger and bigger.

And you had the sense that the Egyptian regime was using some violence, but was definitely waffling in how it was going to respond to the

to these protests and you could see the sort of private views shifting.

You could see people looking at these protests and saying, okay, this is now possible.

What I thought was impossible two months ago is now possible.

And it's that, you know, fear changing sides thing starting to happen.

And it gets to this idea that, okay,

what's going on in the minds of millions of people is the that's the intelligence problem and it's why it's impossible because all of a sudden you have this massive sort of shift this everybody's brains shift in a very short period of time and i think that syria in particular you know during the arab spring has some real parallels and lessons for what we're what we're seeing today

in Iran, and there really are some overlapping characteristics that I think make it a potential interesting case study in what we could be seeing today.

I mean, one obvious one is there are widespread protests, right, in both situations that initially center around the economic situation and sort of basic political freedoms, but eventually come to focus on Iran.

You know, sort of the removal of the leader and the system or the family in the case of the Assad regime.

But in both cases, you have this kind of disorganized grassroots opposition movement that is very fragmented, whose loudest members are overseas and out of the country.

These opposition movements tend to be very cannibalistic, right?

They eat their own.

And they often work at cross purposes.

In Syria, that opposition movement also became much more militaristic over time, or just it transitioned from what had been a largely peaceful kind of disorganized protest movement into