Victor Davis Hanson: Iran Is Preparing an October Surprise Before the Midterms

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. 

We’re about 50 days out from the midterms, and everybody seems to have an October surprise. What’s the situation on the ground in Iran? 

One of the big surprises is we don’t know because this is the first really major engagement where there are no Western journalists allowed into Iran. There are no U.S. ground troops. There are no embedded reporters. The Mossad maybe has agents on the ground, but they’re not publicizing that fact. And Iranians who sporadically call people in the West on their cell phones are hunted down.  

So a lot of it is subjective conjecture. 

But I think it’s pretty clear that Iran is planning, as it is now sporadically, but planning an October surprise near the midterms. Their entire strategy has been to delay, negotiate, attack, delay, negotiate, attack. And the purpose was to, A, drive up the price of oil through that uncertainty, especially in hitting ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and B, get closer and closer and closer to the midterms. 

They don’t really care about the details or statistics of American congressional operations. They don’t really understand that for the Democrats to cut off all aid to military forces that are fighting the regime, that means money that we give Israel, intelligence that we give the Gulf, but more importantly, our daily expenses from the Pentagon, they’re going to have to have a large veto-proof Congress. I don’t think they’ll get that even if they were to win the midterms. 

But that’s what Iran is worried about and concerned about, that they want the Democrats to win. 

Why the Democrats? 

They remember in 2009, a million of them went out in the street to overthrow the regime. Barack Obama, newly inaugurated, didn’t do anything. He just kept mute for about 12 days. 

Why? Because he was going to negotiate with a theocracy about their nuclear program, and he wanted to reboot Iran as part of a rival to democratic Israel and the moderate Gulf regimes. He thought by empowering the Shia Crescent in Iran, in Syria, in Beirut, on the West Bank, and in Gaza, he could have creative tension, and he would be the adjudicator. 

But the people don’t really trust the Democrats, and they know they’ve been very critical of this effort to hurt the theocracy. 

So Iran and the Democrats have the same goal: create chaos. They have the same goal, and that’s to defeat Donald Trump. The Democrats want the Iranians to create chaos, drag out the war, and therefore drive down public opinion and raise the price of gas. That’s clear. They’ve all but said that. 

And in turn, the opposition has a what? What would we call it? An October surprise? It is gaming the midterms as well. 

Now, what are they thinking? 

They are thinking that every time the Democrats come into power, they negotiate with this horrendous regime. They don’t trust that the Democrats want it gone. They fear, third, that the Democrats may be in power in the Congress. They fear that Donald Trump is at 40% popularity, and he might have to make concessions to them. 

So in their interpretation of the calendar, the clock, the time remaining to the midterms, it might be they feel time is running out given two things. 

One, they don’t have any fuel, gasoline, or diesel. We know that much. The gas lines are three to four miles long, and food is scarce, and air conditioning is probably nonexistent. Inflation is rampant, and things are deteriorating at a geometric rate in Iran. 

And two, they don’t think anybody will come to the rescue except Donald Trump, and Donald Trump right now has control of the Congress. 

So in their way of thinking, they may think an October surprise would be to go out in the streets right before the midterms and show that they thank the United States, they support the United States. 

There’s another October surprise. We haven’t heard much from the Kurds. The Turks have been very adamant that they did not want us to help the Iranian Kurds because that could spread into the Turkish Kurds, and the same thing is true of the Iraqi Kurds and the Syrian Kurds, et cetera.  

But they have been more active than usual in the last week. If they sense the people of Iran are rising up or are about to go for broke, they may want to as well join them. So they may have an October surprise. 

Bottom line is we should look then sometime between Oct. 15 and Nov. 3, I would imagine that the Iranian regime will send a huge barrage of missiles into the Gulf states. They will not touch Israel because Israel will reply in a manner that is unthinkable. But they will think they can damage the reputation and the competency of the Trump administration right on the eve of the midterms. 

The people will also think that they want an October surprise, but it’ll be a very different one. They’ll think they have one last shot to go out and by popular upheaval get rid of the regime before the Democrats, if they think they’re going to win, and that’s what conventional wisdom is before it happens. 

And the same thing is true of the Kurds. 

There’s one more October surprise. We don’t know what Donald Trump is going to do, and opinions vary. In the last two weeks of October, he may decide to have a negotiation that actually gives us a peace and opens the Strait. The Strait is open, but without any interference from Iran. I doubt that, but that is a possible October surprise. 

Or he may retaliate against the aggression, or retaliation might be aimed at anything the Iranians do to try to affect the midterm election. 

And what would that be? Hitting dual-use targets, hitting command and control, going for broke himself. 

So sit tight. There’s a lot of known unknowns about Iran. It’s not a stable situation. Anything can happen and anything probably will right before the Nov. 3 midterms. 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

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