The Rest Is Classified - 119. Inside Iran: Why Trump Didn’t Intervene (Ep 2)

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

What does history tell us about how a revolution is going to play out? What can intelligence agencies and political scientists working on Iran learn from Syria? And why didn’t Donald Trump follow through on his plan to militarily intervene in Iran? Listen as David and Gordon look at the ongoing situation in Iran through the lens of intelligence analysts and ask what there is to be learnt from studying revolutions of the past.  ------------------- Make someone a Declassified Club Member this year – go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ ⁠⁠https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified⁠⁠ Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee  ------------------- Pre-order a signed edition of David's latest novel, The Persian,⁠ ⁠here.⁠⁠ ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠⁠ Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It gently cleanses, perfectly removes makeup, and provide 24-hour hydration. Clear away the evidence with the number one Missler Water worldwide by Garnier. Protests in Iran and a violent crackdown, but can the regime survive? And how effective our intelligence agencies at predicting what might come next? Well, welcome to the rest is classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And welcome to this second episode where we're looking at Iran through the lens of how intelligence agencies might understand it. David, of course, a former CIA analyst looking at the Middle East. And we've been trying in the first episode to understand what the pillars are for regime stability,

how you might assess whether a country like Iran was stable or was on the brink of change. We ended really with an exploration of some of the challenges that intelligence analysts might face in doing that. Now, in this episode, I think we're going to look at some of the historical examples, some of the context for that, of when intelligence agencies have tried to understand whether a revolution, whether an uprising might be about to take place and whether it might lead to a change of regime and then apply that to the Iran of today. But before we get to that, let's hear a word from our sponsors, HP. This episode is sponsored by HP. Most people are not counter-espionage experts, but that won't stop them getting targeted by cybercriminals seeking to extract their secrets.

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Thatcrabat. Learn more at adobe.com slash do that with acrobat. So, David, let's go back, I guess, to Iran itself. Because the revolution which brought this regime to power in 1979 is very interesting in itself as a case of a popular uprising and intelligence agencies pretty much failing to predict it, I think. As we dug into this, Gordon, I actually, I feel like it's. That charge, which I had always heard, absorbed and felt like it was largely true. I feel like it's maybe less true.

Well, you're going to try and defend the CIA. I know you are. But quickly, some context on 1979. And I'll note, I'm very angry, Gordon, because we need to do this very quickly. But the rest is history, guys, they get four whole episodes on the revolution. We're going to do it in a minute. We're going to do it in a minute. So here we go.

1979, the Iranian Revolution, it is a, I guess the result of a really broad based uprising against the Shah, Muhammad Reza-Palabi, who was sitting atopalib, a government that in the late 1970s was sort of increasingly unpopular for a whole host of reasons that will probably sound like they kind of are similar to today. The Shah's regime had kind of managed this massive modernization program that had frayed a lot of its support among large numbers of Iran. Iranians. The Shah's regime at the time was a close ally of the United States and pursued these kind of ambitious social and economic reforms called the White Revolution. It had disrupted traditional society. It had made the Iranian system more unequal. It had alienated portions of the

elite, including clergy, bizarre merchants. There was a massive number of urban poor that were obviously seeking no benefits from this. The regime was deeply repressive enforced by its secret police. Sevac. Sebac. And opposition to the regime really coalesced in the mid to late 1970s because there was also an economic slowdown, significant inflation, rising unemployment. And you had a cycle that began on these kind of mass protests.

The regime would crack down, but in some cases, not as effectively as it probably should have if it wanted to suppress the unrest. And you ended up with this kind of cycle of mass protests, some violence, war mass protests that the regime was never quite able to figure out the answer to. Now, amid all of that, you had Ayatollah Khomeini. I've been an exile since the 1960s. He emerges as the, really the symbolic leader

of the opposition, the protest movement. There's, you know, sermons and smuggled recordings that get into Iran. He kind of articulates this powerful critique of the Shah and proposes a very revolutionary concept for government, which is the idea of this sort of Shia Islamic bureaucracy, right, and the rule of the cleric over the system of government in Iran. Now, by late 1978, there's nationwide strikes, especially in the oil sector, really crippling Iran's oil sector and creating, I think, a level of paralysis in the state that we're certainly not seeing the same level today. But the Shah also importantly is secretly ill, right? He has cancer. And he's isolated, increasingly isolated. He's sick. And he flees Iran in January of 1979.

Homanie returns from exile. And the government essentially collapses shortly thereafter. the military kind of sits on the sidelines, and there is, in the months that follow, this kind of, you know, I guess competition between the various revolutionary factions and opposition factions, which culminates in the establishment of the Islamic Republic after a national referendum. How did I do? That was more than a minute. It was more than a minute. It felt like we had to give some context here for how this happened. But let's get to the crucial question, which is that it is wide.

seen as an intelligence failure. Now, you can get into all the details of this. There is one crucial quote, which I think sums it up, which is from none other than the CIA's analytic division in August of 1978. These are not the mini McCloskey's. These are the pre-McCloskey's. The pre-grandfather, I don't know what the pro-Mocke-Signiors. But they wrote August 1978, Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation. They missed it. It didn't age well. It didn't age well. That doesn't age well. I mean, but it's a very interesting example, isn't it, of a failure to see it. And I think, you know, we could spend quite a lot of time arguing, you know, there are other reports which suggest some people that see. And we will. And we

will. We don't. I can if you want. But I think the more interesting question is fundamentally, you know, some people saw something happening. You know, there's some debate about that. But I think the interesting thing is, why didn't they see it? Because I think it is true that on the whole they didn't. Do you think so? Yeah, I think so. I think, look, you're going to pull out some other examples. You can easily find other examples of analysts going, something could happen.

You can always find those, and I think that's fine. It is more complicated than a simple failure. And there are people who said there were problems and there were weaknesses. All of that's true. But I still think, I think it's a failure. Well, allow me a moment to smear another. To smear another intelligence agency in the United States, because at least I want to direct your ire elsewhere, Gordon. Because I don't want you to go out to the CIA.

So here's, this is another report from the state department's intelligence arm called INR, which which wrote in in 1977. Iran is likely to remain stable under the Shah's leadership over the next several years. The prospects are good that Iran will have relatively clear sailing, at least the mid-1980s. So it wasn't just the CIA. No, that's true. And I mean, critically, nobody knew the shot was sick, right? I mean, that in that same INR report, and this was the CIA judgment as well, they said that the shot was in fine health when, in fact, he had lymphatic cancer, which would eventually kill him in 1980. I mean, and he's a U.S. ally. So having missed that is, that's pretty bad. I think that's a really interesting, actually.

example of where a missing piece of intelligence really makes a difference. If a leader is sick and on his last legs, regime stability may be in danger or he may act erratically. And I think you're right. That is actually a crucial kind of piece of the puzzle, which wasn't available there. You can argue it's an intelligence failure not to know that. But yeah, it does kind of affect the analysis. I think there's also some evidence, isn't there, that there was quite an investment in the regime in the relationship between the CIA and Savak, the kind of intelligence. services of Iran in seeing stability between that, which may be meant that one of the criticisms you do hear about intelligence agencies. Sometimes they're talking to other elites and to maybe

the security services. They don't necessarily have their finger on the pulse of what's going on in the bazaars or out the kind of mythical street, as they often call it, the Arab street or whatever here, which I always think is a kind of weird notion. But there is something there about not having a feel for wider society because you're so invested in your relationships within the elite. Yeah. Although a common refrain in the intelligence failure argument is that, you know, nobody really knew anything about the opposition or, you know, the Persian street, which is obviously just one street. You know, if you just walk down it, you'll get a sense of, ask someone, and then you go to, you know, get the sense of a country of, you know, what now is 90 million people, right?

And I think what is interesting is when you look at the State Department reporting that was coming out of the embassy in Tehran in 1977 and 1978, there actually is a pretty nuanced view of the Shia opposition to the Shah. And there's a fascinating cable from, again, the embassy in Tehran written in 1978 that identifies Holmadi as the leader of the revolution and has really insightful commentary on the extent to which Islam had become deeply embedded the lives of a significant portion of the Iranian population and how Khomeini was tapping into that. So you have bits and pieces of really insightful information that are making it into the kind of U.S. intelligence community. There's a draft national intelligence estimate that was written in September of 78 that paints a really gloomy picture of the Shah's chances for survival, allows for the possibility that the Pahlavi dynasty might not last without making significant concessions to the opposite. position. And again, points out that Khomeini is the most influential leader of the Shia clergy and wants to establish a theocracy. But what I find fascinating, and this critique was leveled by a review done by the political scientist Robert Jervis after it became clear that the intelligence community had missed something was that what seems to have been missing or a piece of the puzzle that was missing in the CIA's analysis of Iran was there wasn't like a pillars framework that was getting examined on a regular basis. Methodically. Yeah.

Methodically. There was the critique that Jervis levels against the agency afterward, I think it's correct, is that essentially there was a whole bunch of reactive reporting and analysis that was being done. And there wasn't a kind of step back to look at everything in a methodical way. And a lot of this information that frankly is really insightful on the kind of growing strength of the opposition and who's behind it and isn't making it into the hands of President Carter and the senior advisors around him in this kind of structured and systematic way. But isn't that always the case with intelligence failures is that someone will go, the intelligence was there in the system, the facts were there in the system. but the analytic framework wasn't there to understand those facts or because of the perception

of politics or what policymakers want, it doesn't get to the top in the way it should. People aren't willing to challenge the kind of preconceptions out there. So in that way, it does feel like a kind of classic intelligence failure to some extent. To have people saying in the system there are weaknesses there, but not be able to kind of cohere that into an argument which challenges a very established view, which is, the Shah's our ally, he's there, he's going to stay there, you know, nothing's going to happen. That's important because it's pretty clear that there was a, what you call an anchoring bias that was really strong and at play constantly as the CIA is watching events unfold in Iran,

which is, you know, the Shah is strong and the opposition is weak and divided. And you're sort of anchored to that viewpoint until a point well beyond, it flips. I mean, you could make the same case today, right? I mean, you could you could say, well, look, Iran's security forces and military are coherent and united and loyal because they have been. And the opposition is weak and divided. And even as events sort of shift those things, your mental model of the world is stuck in the past, right? And I think that's, that was very clearly the case in the CIA's analysis on Iran in 1979. So you're right.

I mean, it's kind of a classic intelligence failure. I'll admit it, Gordon, in that you had bits and pieces of really insightful information kind of scattered throughout the system that weren't pulled together properly. You had critical information that was just missed, right? The Shah is sick. That's a really important piece to this puzzle. You don't have it. And then, I mean, the other criticism that I think it's valid, but I also find it to be kind of amusing is that it's an intelligence failure, Iran's 79, because the CIA did not anticipate the course of events.

That makes me smile because we talked about this a bit and teed it up in the first episode. Is that even possible in revolutionary situations? Is it even possible to anticipate the course of events? And I think maybe there Gordon, before we get to our next lens for evaluating Iran, which will be 1989 and the kind of revolutions across central and eastern Europe, maybe we take a break. We come back. We'll see how looking into the past can help us understand what might happen next in Iran. Well, welcome back. We are continuing our journey into understanding how intelligence agencies look.

at these kind of highly dynamic revolutionary situations. And next up is 1989, Gordon, which you should lead this section, Gordon, because I was a young thing. I remember it vividly. You had long hair. It wasn't gray back then. And you were quite long, actually, in my rock days. That's not a definitely a diversion. And I can see here you had like the French Revolution of 1789, Russian Revolution of 1917. I'm not old enough to get to those. ones as examples of where revolutions came, perhaps with surprise. But I think 1989 is one I do remember when famously the Berlin Wall falls. And I remember incredibly vividly. I actually kept all the newspapers from that time because you just felt the headlines were so important. And I think

it's also a really good case study for why some revolutions are not seen coming and why some get crushed and some succeed in overthrowing the regimes. So if you look at it. So if you look at at Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union are under communism in that period. And I think Western intelligence could see that communism was decaying, it was failing to keep up economically with the West. There were these increasing problems with legitimacy. Some of the pillars were a bit weaker, the pillars we talked about last time, dissent growing. But no one predicted the sudden collapse across Eastern Europe in 1989 of all those communist regimes and then eventually the collapse of the Soviet Union. I think worth saying different in different countries.

So, for instance, Poland, it was driven through the 80s, particularly by the trade union solidarity and civil society. I actually went on a slight side by. I went to Gadansk last year and I went to the Solidarity Museum in Gadansk. And anyone who's interested in the end of the Cold War, it is absolutely fantastic. Go to Gadansk and go to the museum because it just gives you an understanding of what happened in Poland. But I think one of the things I'd say is, you know, we talked a bit about the bandwagon effect, the revolutionary bandwagon. And what you saw in Eastern Europe that year was a revolutionary bandwagon across countries. So you saw one country rise up and to some extent succeed.

And then others would follow in its footsteps. So I think that is part of it across what happened. East Germany, though, is the one I think worth focusing on because it famously leads to the fall of the Berlin War, which was the symbolic moment for the collapse of communism. And I think it's also interesting because we talked about authoritarian states. Well, famously, the Stars, the East German Security Service were incredibly effective in many ways. I mean, per person, they had more informants in the population than any other regime in history. It was incredibly surveilled.

And yet it still collapsed. And I think that is interesting. And the parallel with Iran, it's people power. It's people going out on the streets, people protesting. And there's a great line from the time where a writer said, fear changed sides. So the regime started to fear the people rather than the people fearing the regime. And that switch, isn't it, is hugely important because it's the moment where the state loses the will to kind of take action.

And there's a particular moment, I think, in Leipzig in October, where there are massive demonstrations being planned, people going to come out, the state is prepared to repress it. You know, the tanks are ready, the hospitals are told to stand by. the local officials, though, call up national officials and say, we don't know what to do. There are so many people out there. The people are nonviolent. The national official kind of says, oh, I don't know what to do. I'll call you back. Never does. And so they do nothing. And to me, that one moment in Leipzig is really interesting because it is the kind of moment where you've got the security forces ready to go. But there is a lack of will at the top. You know, the elite cohesion breaks down within the state. over whether they're willing to repress and take action. And some people are questioning, would the soldiers actually shoot their own people? It's quite a fine margin, though, I think. Because, you know, if the official had said shoot, might have all been different?

You know, would the bandwagon have been stopped? I don't know. I think it's very interesting. It's not even the difficulty of predicting these kind of dynamics, but just the impossibility of it. I mean, because Timur Koran has, you know, this political scientist that we've been quoting frequently who's done this great work on kind of revolutions and revolutionary dynamics. I mean, he's got this great line who's writing about 1989 where he says pinpointing a specific event that pushed the bandwagon over the hill is akin to identifying the cough responsible for a flu epidemic. You cannot predict these situations. You actually can't.

Yeah. Yeah. Because that fear changing size point is it's a. Again, it's that shift, it's that incredible shift of the private view becoming the public view. And yeah, if the East Germans kill hundreds of people in Leipzig, maybe that private view stays private. At the same time in Dresden, famously, you've got this young KGB officer called Vladimir Putin, who is watching protests as well. And he asked the kind of the Soviet military commanders who are there based in East Germany what they're going to do. And their reply is nothing because Moscow is silent.

And again, it's this interesting idea that the Soviet Union had signalled. It was no longer willing to use force to back the regime in East Germany. So that kind of foreign government role is very much a kind of role here that the kind of supporting state for East Germany had decided they weren't going to act. We talked about this a bit in our kind of declassified club, didn't we, where we had Mark Galiotti talking about how this had been a formative moment for Putin. Because I think Putin himself, his lesson from this is, if you're silent, then protests kind of gather momentum and they can overthrow a regime. So, you know, his lesson is go in and go hard to crush the protests, which is something he will then do in neighboring countries and in Russia itself. Well, I guess in some ways, I mean, you know, there are a couple examples from the Cold War of the Soviet Union and communist forces crushing uprising. things brutally and quickly.

Hungary in 56 and then in Prague and 68. And I think in both cases, similar dynamics where everybody was surprised that it happened, but then the extreme brutality of the response ensured that fear didn't switch sides and prevented that revolutionary bandwagon from happening. There's a very interesting parallel as well from, Iran to Hungary in 56 because I think in 56 a lot of the Hungarians thought the West was, and particularly the US, would come to help them. And they felt they'd had that message actually

from the West and almost encouragement to rise up. And then it never came, which I think, interesting parallel with Iran recently. But also just finally on 1989, you know, there's a very interesting comparison from, you know, what we're talking about happened in Leipzig to China. Because that same year, of course, June had seen Tiananmen's You'd had the protesters, student protesters come out in this huge square. I mean, I've been in it in the center of Beijing, fill the square for a prolonged period. And for a while, it's so interesting because the leadership equivocates. There are splits within the Communist Party leadership about how to deal with these reformist movements.

There's some military units which appear unwilling to act against their own people. But then eventually the Chinese leadership decides they're going to go, and, you know, to use the unpleasant phrase, go big, and send in the troops to kind of massacre and kill the students and the protesters. And I think that there was actually talk in East Germany, you know, in 1989, in November, October, November, when the walls coming down or about to come down, whether they're going to do a Tiananmen. Because I think they realise that that is the only way of doing it is to effectively go big. And I think the lesson for some regimes is you either have to go big and go all in and repress. or if you kind of half repress, it doesn't work because you often just kind of spur more protests. And I think, you know, Ukraine saw that 2013, 2014, the Maidan revolution where they kind of,

they start to repress, but they're not willing quite to do the kind of Tianan-style massacres. And as a result, the government is overthrown in Ukraine and you get a more democratic regime. So I think it's so interesting because, you know, you look between China, East Germany, both 1989, the two communist regimes, you know, the East German and the others, collapse, but in China, we still got a Communist Party ruling the country because of what they did in Tiananmen Square. Gordon, I guess that brings us to the third lens for looking at how an intelligence agency deals with and analyzes unrest, which is near and dear to my heart, which is the Arab Spring of 2011.

So, yeah, talk us through that, because you were in the CIA at the time as an analyst. So, I mean, that felt on the outside like it caught everyone. by surprise. I mean, it started in Tunisia, didn't it, with a kind of street vendor protesting about corruption, kind of interesting parallel about ordinary people protesting about economic oppression, a bit like Iran in the mobile phones in the bazaars, and yet led to this kind of revolutionary bandwagon across the kind of Arab world, didn't it? It did, yeah. And I think there were many points here where this revolutionary bandwagon, thing, it really resonates with me because you saw it not only spreading inside countries,

but across countries throughout the Arab world. And it was absolutely surprising. Nobody had predicted that it would happen, kind of to this broader point on, you don't see these things coming. By definition, they're unpredictable, and you can't really forecast them. You can look, and we had been, you know, as Middle East analysts, like we all had an understanding of the deep problems that most of these governments had and the fact that if you had gone through, as we had, actually, we had done a pillars exercise because by this point in the CIA, basically every country team was doing something similar and looking at whatever authoritarian regime they were covering and saying, well, what are the pillars of stability here and where are they at and do we see signposts

of any of these things weakening? So we had done that exercise on Syria actually, I think maybe six to 12 months prior to the protests breaking out. And I would say we had an understanding of where those pillars were, but we didn't have an ability to forecast what was coming next, right? Because it was just it was a surprise. And I distinctly remember as the protests are happening in Tunisia and Egypt, and then, you know, the Tunis president, Ben Ali famously flees, you know, Tunis, which, which that sets off another cascade because populations all over the Arab world look and they say, well, we can do this. This could work. Right. Yeah. It's that shift of that, it's that private view shifting to become the public one. But it was very fascinating and it gets to kind of

the anchoring bias that we all have after Ben Ali fled in, I think he left in late December of 2010. And then in January of 2011, there were massive street protests in Cairo famously against Hosni Barg's rule. And as we were all watching these, I remember everybody sat down, all these political analysts across the CIA, sat down and and started writing pieces that basically said, wasn't exactly this blunt, but it was kind of like, here's why that's not going to happen in my country. And I remember one of my good friends

was actually writing a piece about the significant hurdles to a protest movement in Cairo when protests broke out. And then he was like, okay, well, I'm going to delete that draft. Rip that one up. You know, I remember being actually in an Arab country. in January and February of 2011. And it was a country that was not experiencing unrest yet.

And I have distinct memories of sitting at restaurants and cafes and watching these protests in Egypt get bigger and bigger and bigger. And, you know, you just, 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 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 there really are some some you know overlapping kind of characteristics that I think make it a potential kind of an interesting case study in what we could be seeing today.

It is interesting, isn't it? Because the Syrian regime was facing protests, and it looked like it was, you know, teetering on the edge. And yet it survived, didn't it? So what do you see as the kind of parallels or the differences between Iran and Syria? I mean, one obvious one is there 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, 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. Right. 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. So that's another potential parallel. 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? Right, right. And then, you know, Syria also had widespread kind of socioeconomic problems, mass youth unemployment, housing crisis.

There had been mass internal migration from a drought in the east. So you had these kind of big socioeconomic problems, right, that the regime in Syria was incapable of solving. And I think, here in Iran, we have similar parallels where you just, the level of sort of mismanagement and corruption has led to a situation where that, that socioeconomic contract between the regime and the people has really, has really frayed. Also in Syria, you had, you know, a regime whose revolutionary institutions had totally decayed and whose legitimacy narrative was really quite weak. The most important, quote-unquote, political party in Syria in 2011 was the Ba'ath party. And regime officials at the time were, they were kind of surprised and probably shouldn't have been,

to see just how hollowed out the thing had become. I mean, nobody believed in this kind of Assadist, Arab nationalist ideology anymore. It was just totally hollowed out. And I think similarly, you know, with Iran today, as we discussed in the last episode, you know, this kind of legitimacy narrative for the Islamic Republic has really has really weakened. Yeah. But I mean, there are significant differences, aren't there? I mean, you had the al-a-white 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 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 mix, but there were parts of it, which were quite heavily Islamist, as we know, from Ahmad al-Shara, who's now in power, you know, had 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. Well, and then elites in Syria, at least initially, fairly cohesive, I would say. And so were the regime's military and security services. And in particular, the units that were responsible for regime protection, the more elite pieces of the military, most of the intelligence agencies, they just, there really weren't significant affections or instances where you had orders disobeyed to fire on protesters. to go after armed opposition.

And I think so far, that's what we're seeing in Iran. And I think there's some interesting kind of lessons that, for me, came out of the Syria experience that I think could relate to Iran or at least maybe shed some light on where things are headed or how we could look at the situation. Because one of them, and this was a constant refrain inside the Obama administration in 2011 was when you looked at the sort of cascade of protests across the Arab world. And then you looked at O'Bennelie fled, Halasne Mubarak eventually steps down. Gaddafi is killed amid this massive uprising against his regime.

And the lesson that a lot of Obama's advisors took from all of this was to sort of generally conflate a regime's loss of political legitimacy and the appearance of protest with the imminent demise of the regime. Like, it's just going to happen. And I think there's a tendency, and we're seeing a little bit of this in the commentary around Iran right now, is, you know, to sort of conflate a regime's loss of legitimacy with the fact that it's just going to be toast. It's inevitable, and it's going to be soon. And I think that tends to ignore the ability of these kind of regimes to adapt, which they do have. And it ignores, I think, the absolute criticality of the loyalty of the security and the kind of coercive apparatus.

And if those things hold, it's really hard to unseat these regimes. And if you do unseat them, typically the path there runs through a long civil war. and it takes, as we saw in Syria, almost 15 years. So that's kind of one, I think, significant lesson. I mean, the other one, the kind of parallel, I find this very interesting, is the calls by the internal opposition for external help, particularly military support. And what happened in Syria was that the oppositionist in,

Damascus, Aleppo and Holmes, these other places, were looking at what was going on in Libya at the time, where the U.S. had intervened, NATO had intervened, and essentially acted as the Libyan rebels air force to help unseat Gaddafi. And the Syrian opposition began to call for exactly the same thing in Syria. 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, you know,

kind of bomb some of Gaddafi's troops and start off a process which does lead to the fall of Gaddafi. But interesting enough, they don't want to put the boots on the ground. They just want to kind of do this air power side of things and then effectively let a civil war play out. And then that civil war becomes bloody and violent and goes on for years. So I think one of the challenges for the in Iranians is that in Washington, and I think in some other places, they're looking at that and going, that is not necessarily a successful model or outcome to go do some military strikes on, say, Iran, which some people have called for, you know, on some of the security forces,

because you don't know where quite that will lead, and it could lead to destabilization and chaos, as happened in Libya, rather than some kind of happy outcome of a democratic regime change in Iran. I think that is one of the things in people's minds and one of the reasons why I think we saw a caution from the Trump administration to actually necessarily pull the trigger. I think there are some other reasons as well. Arab states were saying to them, you know, who knows where this could lead or what you could do.

I think the ability to affect change as a foreign power is often quite limited and could be overstated in these cases, ultimately. I think there is some really interesting kind of political science ever. evidence, that the most successful regime changes, uprisings, revolutions are the ones where they are organic and from the people, rather than with outside help or support, which just kind of adds a different dynamic, delegitimizes it sometimes because people can go, you're just being supported by a foreign power, you think about Iraq, you think about Libya in these cases. And I think that is one of the kind of challenges people face is that it's hard to see what the

role of outside powers would actually be, even though some want it. There was some interesting academic research that some members of our team did back in 2011. And one of the most significant variables in determining the length of a civil war is the extent of foreign involvement. And you'd be unsurprised to hear that the more foreign involvement there is, the longer the civil war goes on. Right. Yeah. So I think in this case at Iran, I would wager a guess that more foreign involvement is going to sort of tip us in that in that direction, right, of a kind of civil conflict between the regime and the opposition. I'm not making a statement on whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. I'm just saying that that's probably the direction it tips us in.

The other dynamic that I think is an interesting parallel is that political change is kind of usually a long-term game in these situations. In Syria, the first year of unrest was marked by waves of protest, but then, you know, and they would sort of wax and wane, too. I mean, that's another piece of this. We're recording this on the 18th of January, and we're in this period where it kind of looks like the regime has suppressed the unrest. And yet, in Syria, there were these moments where protests,

dwindled and died down and then they came back. Or what came back a couple weeks later might have been a pocket of armed opposition to the regime that they were then unable to suppress. And so there's this kind of waxing and waning of the opposition. And a lot of the really important developments in the Syrian crisis were also happening out of the public eye as you had opposition, even very local opposition, kind of coalescing against the regime, but obviously doing that quietly, not as a massive protest. So these things take time.

I mean, Syria lasted 13 years. You know, and even in 1979, in the Iran parallel, I mean, it was over a year of sort of escalating unrest and protest before the Shah fled. So these things are marathons, you know, they're not sprints. So I guess David, as we come to an end, I mean, we've talked about how difficult it is to predict what's going to happen. So I think trying to predict what would happen would be slightly foolish for us at this point. But I guess we can talk about what some of the scenarios might be and what we might look at. It's interesting. I spoke to someone a Brit who knows Iran really well.

And, you know, his view was this is a regime in its death throes, which is flailing around desperately at this point, which has lost its legitimacy. But I think, you know, we both agreed. you do not know how long those death throws may last. That doesn't give you a time frame. But I think his view was very much that it would be very hard for it to regain any legitimacy. It's lost its legitimacy. We talked earlier about China. One of the things China was able to do was, yes, it did this brutal repression.

But then, in the years afterwards, it was able to strike a new socio-economic contract with its people and go, we will give you economic growth. You might not get political freedom, but, you know, that's the trade-off. economic growth for a lack of political freedom. And it kind of worked for the Communist Party in solidifying their control in China. Now, you cannot see that happening in Iran. You can't see it being able to kind of re-legitimize itself or create a new social economic contract because it's got sanctions. It's got all these other pressures on the economy. So I think for that reason, this idea it's in its death throes does feel right, but that doesn't really tell you how long it's going to last or how it's going to play out. I like how we've spent two episodes.

It's talking about how unpredictable these things are. And now we're going to offer, offer some predictions. Which is going to be proved wrong by the time this episode comes out. Immediately proven wrong. You know, I don't know. I'm kind of reliving some of my Syria experience here, obviously, as we've been talking about this, because it was a very, it's a hard, you know, it's a hard conversation to have in some respects because there are a lot of people who rightly, I mean, as I do, you look at

the regime, the Iranian regime, and you say, ugh, this thing is a brutal system that is predatory, that is extremely, like, who wants to live under a system like this? It's not offering the China example of, you know, you don't have any political rights, but, you know, you've got bread on the table and we're managing this system economically fairly well. They don't do that. And so this is a despicable regime and you want it to fall, you know, and you want something better for the Iranian people. My most recent book is on Iran. Like 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, you know, also this is a

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, you know, 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 outside of regime collapses just because they're brutal, just because they've mismanaged the country horribly, just because, you know, 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 of Iran today where, you know, there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of wishcasting about the demise of this regime. And I don't see the cracks yet in the coercive apparatus. Like, that's what I'm watching, right? Is are we starting to see any of these cracks amongst the security forces, yeah. Do they start to decay? Yeah. Exactly.

Exactly. And that's the critical piece here. And I just don't see it yet. So, you know, I hope, I hope this thing changes and the Iranian people get something better out of the future than they've gotten out of the recent past with this government. But you just, I think as an analyst, you know, you have to be really careful that you don't transpose your own desires on to the analysis. The other comment, I'll say, just to close out the parallels with Syria, is I was struck as a intelligence analyst the tremendous gap between the truth as reported in the press and what we were seeing in the intelligence picture. Because I will say, if you just read what was going on in Al Jazeera, the way it was being reported, journalistically,

And then you looked at the way the regime was talking about the situation internally. You looked at the satellite imagery of the protests, things like that. Sometimes those two pictures overlapped. A lot of times they were very different. And so the last kind of final caution for my, you know, for the, my mini-McCloskey experience as an analyst is there's a lot of stuff right now that we're not seeing on the outside. and a lot of truth about what happened, good, bad, ugly, tragic will come out down the road, but we have nothing approaching a comprehensive picture of what's going on right now.

And the people who have a better picture, you know, they're not going to, they're unfortunately not going to come and talk to us on the rest is classified Gordon because they're in skiffs somewhere. Yeah. And I think ending on a note of humility is the right one about. the ability to forecast these things because a lot of people have tried. And as we've talked about with previous revolutions and uprisings have tried to predict those. And it is, I think, for reasons we've really explored, hard. And there are reasons why it's hard. And there are reasons why it's hard to see cracks in a regime or in the elite or how the security forces are going to act. And it can come down to very interesting individual decisions. So there, David, I think let's leave this

exploration of Iran and predicting revolutions. Just a reminder, if you're a member of the Declassified Club, you're going to be able to hear an interview with Arash Azizi talking about some of these issues. Do join at the rest is classified.com. But we hope you've enjoyed it, and we will see you next time. We'll see you next time.