Peaceful protests do not work when the government that you are opposing shoots protesters in the street and/or jails & tortures them. Didn’t work so well in Syria either. Only the government has guns in Iran and they’d rather rule over a hellish cesspool of their own countrymen starving and drying than lose power.

And quite relevantly to the analogy, in Iran, the regime controls most of the economic links to the outside world, including the ability to convert the rial to dollars or euros.