US Officials' Predictions on Middle East Uprisings

If you'd asked any US official on the eve of the uprising in Egypt, the eve of the

uprising in Tunisia, whether they thought that those coun-

those, uh, governments

were stable, they almost certainly would have said yes.

If you'd asked a US official some- a few months into the

Syrian uprising in 2011 whether they thought that President Bashar al-Assad

would

survive another six months, they almost universally would have said

no.

He survived another thirteen years or twelve years.

Had you asked them on the eve of, in 2024, right before

he collapsed, he fell, whether they thought he

was gonna collapse, they would have

said no. In fact, they were in the middle of negotiations with

Syria to try to

think of the conditions for normalization.

So don't feel bad if your predictions are wrong,

because even the CIA gets it wrong

time and time again. So I'm not gonna make a prediction, uh-