David McCloskey

The units that have been put out to suppress the protests, to kill protesters, to make arrests, seem to have performed as requested and required by the regime.

There have been instances...

I think of some security units were either unable, obviously, to suppress protests or in some cases, I think, armed resistance to the regime.

And there have been some cases, it seems, where Iranian security forces have essentially said, look, we're not going to, we're just kind of going to let this happen, right?

We're not going to actually suppress the protest, right?

There have been little instances of that throughout the last few weeks.

But when you kind of look at have the security forces in general performed, I think the answer is that the regime has held the line, right?

And you haven't seen significant cracks in these institutions.

And maybe it's worth a little bit going to talk about the institutions because we say loyal and effective military and security services.

Well, in an authoritarian regime...

such as Iran's, and it was a very similar setup in Syria.

You'd find a similar setup in Russia or in China.

The way you run these

systems is on what I would call like a hub and spoke model.

You have number one, very large security organizations.

I mean, we're talking in the Iranian context about hundreds of thousands of people that are technically on the rolls of some of these organizations.

And all of the organizations have a bit of an overlapping mandate.

And they all watch each other.

Right.

They all spy on each other.