So Iran has a super force of well paid, well fed Savak-style guys they can send house-to-house to the Basij guys who normally man checkpoints? Wow.

You don't need to send to the guys who normally man checkpoints. You make sure that the guys who are in charge of the Basij guys know that if their guys aren't at their checkpoints, some Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps folks will come calling. And those IO-IRGC agents are people that you don't mess around with, else you disappear to meet a very unpleasant end.

This is a repressive authoritarian security state, Dope. Of course they have folks that will kidnap and torture and kill the ordinary people, in order to make sure things run smoothly. It's a pretty basic set-up - the elite folks threaten the upper-level folks to threaten the mid-level folks to threaten the common folks.

That's why the Iranian regime is acting the way it is. They're fairly confident that the regime can withstand the economic pain that the common folk will endure far longer than the U.S. government can withstand the economic pain - because even though our economy is stronger and the pain is thus proportionally smaller, our government is far more responsive to the pain of its citizens than the Iranian government.