Comment by reliabilityguy

> Iran's regime remains strong and stable - it controls all the political institutions, it controls the civilian government at the local level, it controls the religious / cultural institutions, it controls the military and it has substantial support from the people.

I see two issues with this assessment. First, I am not sure how substantial is the support from the people. And second, Assad also had all this control over the military, the local governments, etc., etc., and then his rule collapsed in a week.

While Islamic Republic's repressive machine in the form of IRCG and Basij are in much better shape than Assad's, it is not that great if they had to bus in Iraqi militias to help with the suppression of protests.

I do agree that it is not clear if there are viable opposition figures inside Iran, on the other hand it is naive to expect it to be the case given the tight grip IR had on the country.

I guess we can hope that all this war is not for nothing.