David McCloskey

And you had the sense that the Egyptian regime was using some violence, but was definitely waffling in how it was going to respond to the

to these protests and you could see the sort of private views shifting.

You could see people looking at these protests and saying, okay, this is now possible.

What I thought was impossible two months ago is now possible.

And it's that, you know, fear changing sides thing starting to happen.

And it gets to this idea that, okay,

what's going on in the minds of millions of people is the that's the intelligence problem and it's why it's impossible because all of a sudden you have this massive sort of shift this everybody's brains shift in a very short period of time and i think that syria in particular you know during the arab spring has some real parallels and lessons for what we're what we're seeing today

in Iran, and there really are some overlapping characteristics that I think make it a potential interesting case study in what we could be seeing today.

I mean, one obvious one is there are widespread protests, right, in both situations that initially center around the economic situation and sort of basic political freedoms, but eventually come to focus on Iran.

You know, sort of the removal of the leader and the system or the family in the case of the Assad regime.

But in both cases, you have this kind of disorganized grassroots opposition movement that is very fragmented, whose loudest members are overseas and out of the country.

These opposition movements tend to be very cannibalistic, right?

They eat their own.

And they often work at cross purposes.

In Syria, that opposition movement also became much more militaristic over time, or just it transitioned from what had been a largely peaceful kind of disorganized protest movement into

organized pockets of armed opposition to the regime.

And I think hopefully we'll get more information out of Iran as the internet comes back up and we get some more firsthand accounts.

But it's hard for me to imagine this many people killed if you didn't have some pockets of true armed resistance.

to the Iranian regime.

And so maybe we're seeing a potential shift in some parts of Iran or in some pockets of this opposition where you're having people actually picking up weapons and using that to defend themselves, defend protesters, or even just go after the regime.