David McCloskey

And yet in Syria, there were these moments where protests dwindled and died down and then they came back.

Or what came back a couple of weeks later might have been a pocket of armed opposition to the regime.

that they were then unable to suppress.

And so there's this kind of waxing and waning of the opposition.

And a lot of the really important developments in the Syrian crisis were also happening out of the public eye as you had opposition, even very local opposition,

kind of coalescing against the regime, but obviously doing that quietly, not as a massive protest.

So these things take time.

I mean, Syria lasted 13 years, you know, and even in 1979 in the Iran parallel, I mean, it was over a year of sort of escalating unrest and protests before the Shah fled.

So these things are marathons, you know, they're not sprints.

I like how we've spent two episodes talking about how unpredictable these things are.

Now we're going to offer some predictions.

immediately proven wrong.

I don't know.

I'm kind of reliving some of my Syria experience here, obviously, as we've been talking about this, because it was a very... It's a hard conversation to have in some respects because...

There are a lot of people who rightly, I mean, as I do, you look at the regime, the Iranian regime, and you say, ugh, this thing is a brutal system that is predatory, that is extremely... Who wants to live under a system like this?

It's not offering...

The China example of, you know, you don't have any political rights, but, you know, you've got bread on the table and we're managing the system economically fairly well.

They don't do that.

And so this is a despicable regime and you want it to fall, you know, and you want something better for the Iranian people.

My most recent book is on Iran.