David McCloskey

on the streets or inside the military and security services, when you would have sort of this cascading shift in public views, right?

What is the point at which you understand the prevalence of everybody else's private views so it triggers the shift in the public view?

That is not something you can really easily collect on.

And in particular, when we go back to the pillars, I mean, the two that are most important, I would argue, are elite cohesion and the loyalty of the military and security services.

There, you have the added challenge of trying to understand what might be going on in the heads of

of, in some cases, a very small group of people inside the governing structures of Iran, inside the management and sort of senior level positions of all these security services, like what's going on in their heads?

That's usually a spot where intelligence agencies, you know, even effective ones are going to have real gaps.

There's also the hard truth, which brings me no joy to say, but just does need to be said, which is...

A regime willing and able to use its coercive apparatus to suppress unrest and suppress dissent can stay in power for a long time.

Even if you were a... I mean, as many Iran commentators have said, this is kind of a zombie regime that's lost its legitimacy, is very internationally isolated, and has wrecked its own economy.

You could make the argument that the North Korean regime has pulled off this trick for decades, which is you just manage regime stability through lethality at the end of the day.

Yeah, over 13 years.

We'll talk about 1979 and kind of the nature of the revolution that brought this regime to power in our next episode.

But I do think one of the learnings that the Iranian regime has taken, both from that experience and also from Syria,

is that you as an authoritarian government have a very short window right up front when you have this kind of unrest to demonstrate overwhelming and brutal force

in order to stop that revolutionary bandwagon.

And when we were working on Syria back in 2011, one of our senior analysts wrote a paper, which I think might have actually made it to President Obama's desk.

And it was a question on comparing Assad, President Assad's response to the Shahs back in 1979.

And there were differences certainly, but a major similarity was actually, despite the brutality that Assad used, he really waffled

There was a mixture of coercion applied very unevenly, but also sort of hesitancy and offering or trying to offer sort of political and economic carrots, kind of.