David McCloskey

organized pockets of armed opposition to the regime.

And I think hopefully we'll get more information out of Iran as the internet comes back up and we get some more firsthand accounts.

But it's hard for me to imagine this many people killed if you didn't have some pockets of true armed resistance.

to the Iranian regime.

And so maybe we're seeing a potential shift in some parts of Iran or in some pockets of this opposition where you're having people actually picking up weapons and using that to defend themselves, defend protesters, or even just go after the regime.

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.