Gordon Carrera

You're relating that to the fact we have seen these deaths of security forces, you're suggesting.

there are armed elements going up against.

I mean, there's talk that in certain parts of the country, there's kind of, you know, minority groups or others who might have become more violent.

So yeah, I take your point.

That's a kind of slight unknown, but it's a potential parallel, isn't it?

Yeah.

But I mean, there are significant differences, aren't there?

I mean, you had the Alawite minority in rule, in power in Syria, who kind of facing a kind of Islamist opposition in that case, and fearing being wiped out by them.

Iran is a kind of a complex country with a lot of minorities, but some of those dynamics are fundamentally different, I think we should point out, shouldn't we?

And that the Syrian opposition was a

a mix, but there were parts of it which were quite heavily Islamist, as we know from Ahmad al-Shara, who's now in power.

He'd come through that kind of world and been linked to some of those groups, whereas the Iranian opposition feels very different, but also quite diverse and dispersed in that sense.

It's inevitable and it's going to be soon.

Yeah.

And it's very interesting, the Libyan example, because I remember it well, that Gaddafi was in power, he'd faced these protests, and then he was sending his security forces to Benghazi.

And the assumption, and from the language of the Gaddafi regime, was there was going to be a massacre there.

They were just going to massacre the protesters and civilians.

And so at that point, the US, UK, France intervene with air power and basically bomb some of Gaddafi's troops and start off a process which does lead to the fall of Gaddafi.

But interestingly enough, they don't want to put the boots on the ground.

They just want to do this air power side of things and then effectively let a civil war play out.