David McCloskey

Well, and then elites in Syria...

at least initially, fairly cohesive, I would say.

And so were the regime's military and security services.

And in particular, the units that were responsible for regime protection, the more elite pieces of the military, most of the intelligence agencies, they just, there really weren't significant defections or instances where you had orders disobeyed to fire on protesters and to go after armed opposition.

And I think so far, that's what we're seeing in Iran.

And I think there's some interesting kind of lessons that for me came out of the Syria experience that I think could relate to Iran, or at least maybe shed some light on where things are headed or how we could look at the situation.

Because one of them, and this was a constant refrain inside the Obama administration in 2011,

was when you looked at the sort of cascade of protests across the Arab world.

And then you looked at, oh, Ben Ali fled, Hosni Mubarak eventually steps down, Gaddafi is killed amid this massive uprising against his regime.

And the lesson that a lot of Obama's advisors learned

took from all of this was to sort of generally conflate a regime's loss of political legitimacy and the appearance of protest with the imminent demise of the regime.

It's just going to happen.

And I think there's a tendency, and we're seeing a little bit of this in the commentary around Iran right now, is to sort of conflate

regime's loss of legitimacy with the fact that it's just going to be toast.

And I think that tends to ignore the ability of these kind of regimes to adapt, which they do have.

And it ignores, I think, the absolute criticality of the loyalty of the security and the kind of coercive apparatus.

And if those things hold...

it's really hard to unseat these regimes.

And if you do unseat them, typically the path there runs through a long civil war.

And it takes, as we saw in Syria, almost 15 years.