David McCloskey

I spent a lot of time speaking with Iranians for this and trying to understand the country.

And you want something better for 90 million people who have not gotten a good shake from the Islamic Republic.

And also, this is a regime that has decided to murder...

potentially tens of thousands of its own people in a short period of time to remain in power.

It's despicable and you want it gone.

And I felt the same way about Assad in Syria.

And yet, I think analytically, you can fall into a trap of wanting something.

And so you say that it's going to happen, right?

And we got a lot of flack even inside the intelligence community for

kind of inside the national security establishment for kind of writing in 2011 that, well, hey, you know, like it's not inevitable.

that this regime, the al-Sadr regime collapses.

Just because they're brutal, just because they've mismanaged the country horribly, just because there's no legitimacy narrative left any longer, they still have considerable resources at their disposal and a willingness to use them.

And I see a lot of parallels with the situation in Iran today, where there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of wish casting

about the demise of this regime.

And I don't see the cracks yet in the coercive apparatus.

That's what I'm watching.

Are we starting to see any of these cracks?

Do they start to decay?

Yeah.

Exactly.