We are now less than two weeks away from the mid-term elections to be held on November 3. There have been many predictions of a ‘blue wave’ of Democratic wins due to Trump’s record low poll numbers, high cost of gas prices, persistent inflation, and the stalemate in the US-Israel initiated war with Iran. I have become very wary of such predictions. I have been through many election cycles where the polls predicted Democratic wins only to find that the final results were underwhelming. I am particularly skeptical about potential wins in states like Texas and Florida, that have often proved to be mirages.

We are also now well into ‘October Surprise’ territory, where it is speculated that Trump and Republicans will spring some major new action in an effort to distract voters in general and galvanize their own supporters to go to the polls in large numbers. We never know what form these surprises take until after they happen but this article in The Atlantic says that planning is underway to renew attacks on Iran.

The size and targets of the potential strikes—and whether the administration will ultimately proceed—are still being debated. The plans are being developed by U.S. Central Command, which is coordinating the war effort, a U.S. official told us. Even the plans’ advocates acknowledge that limited strikes would not, by themselves, bring Iran to the negotiating table, restore safe travel through the Strait of Hormuz, or lower gas prices before Election Day. But those in favor believe that further action after months of uneasy peace could allow Trump to demonstrate strength and potentially declare some sort of victory, giving Republicans much-needed momentum heading into the election. “It would make the president look like he got a win and that gas prices would start going down,” a Republican familiar with the deliberations told us after being granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. A limited operation could be followed up by more substantial military action after the midterms, when Trump has suggested that the conflict, which is now in its eighth month, could resume.

Any strike campaign would put the roughly 50,000 U.S. troops in the region, as well as Gulf allies, at risk of Iranian retaliation, and further deplete America’s munitions stockpiles. Even some of the president’s most ardent supporters want the U.S. to exit the war in order to halt the rise in inflation. An inconclusive limited strike is likely to have the opposite effect. Crude-oil prices have typically risen when the U.S. has resumed strikes after a pause, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“Military action has done nothing to drive down oil prices; in fact, it has done the opposite,” Will Walldorf, an international-affairs professor at Wake Forest University and a senior fellow at the think tank Defense Priorities, told us. “And if this is an attempt to rally the Republican vote, how does that make any sense given how unpopular this war is?”
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Trump has been publicly furious about the war’s persistence and is believed by those close to him to feel privately humiliated by his inability to bring the conflict to a successful conclusion. 

Trump deserves to be humiliated. The hubris that he felt after kidnapping Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro seemed to make him easily persuaded by Benjamin Netanyahu that an attack on Iran would also lead to a quick and easy victory, with the overthrow of the Iranian government and its replacement by a new one friendly to the US. But even killing their Supreme Leader did not produce that and even resulted in the regime become even more entrenched.

According to Drop Site News, Iran thinks that the elections to be held shortly in the US and Israel increase the chances for an attack by the US and Israel as Trump and Netanyahu seek to improve their flagging fortunes. They are warning that they have the capacity to strike back.

The U.S. and Israel are preparing to resume attacks on Iran, according to senior Iranian officials and a U.S. official, and may even launch operations before next week’s Israeli elections. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is fighting for his political life, and the Israeli press is rife with reports that he is looking for a way to exploit the Iran standoff to his advantage. In the U.S., President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are at historic lows, and the midterm elections are less than two weeks away.

Iran’s top security official, Gen. Mohsen Rezaei, the Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and personal representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, told Drop Site News that, in the event of an attack, Iran has capacity to continue launching missiles and drones at various U.S. assets across the region in retaliation and that it would expand its range of targets.

“If the question is whether Iran still has the ability to continue missile and drone operations, the answer is yes,” Rezaei said in an exclusive written interview. “The United States has valuable assets in the region. In the event of war, cables, data centers and artificial intelligence facilities could also come within range. If the conflict begins again, we will have a broader plan.”
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Tehran believes Israel would be tasked with firing the first shots, the senior Iranian official said, aimed at “destroying Iran’s newly deployed air defense systems, in order to open the path for American bombers.” The U.S., he said, would likely focus on attacking Iran’s southern defense systems along the Strait of Hormuz and potentially attempt to seize one of the islands off the Iranian mainland after heavy bombing. Trump, he said, is continuing his quest for a notable action that he can use to proclaim victory, adding that Iran believes he may seek to launch a “token” attack on one of Iran’s underground nuclear sites, such as Pickaxe Mountain, and subsequently portray it as a definitive blow. “Trump is flat-out lying about Iran’s nuclear program,” the official said.

Rezaei warned that if the US thought that Iran has been too weakened to fight back, they would be mistaken because they have spent decades preparing for a broader war waged by the U.S.

“Iran has invested for years in building redundancy into these capabilities: dispersed production, underground facilities, different launch systems and the ability to repair damage and replace losses,” Rezaei told Drop Site. “More importantly, you should not assess our capacity solely by asking how many missiles remain in storage. In a prolonged war, the central question is whether a country can sustain a continuous cycle of production, deployment and response. We have shown that, even months after the war began, we can still impose costs on the other side.”

Rezaei also indicated that Tehran would deploy new capabilities in its retaliatory response. “We did not deploy all our capabilities in the previous stages. We brought more capabilities into operation in proportion to the intensity of the war, and we are also prepared for the next stage,” Rezaei said.

During the war, Iran carried out at least 135 drone and missile strikes on 84 critical infrastructure sites across seven countries—Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain, according to a Reuters investigation. While Gulf governments repeatedly attributed the damage to falling debris from intercepted Iranian missiles and drones, the investigation found evidence of deliberate, precision strikes targeting critical equipment. The attacks demonstrated “precision, targeting expertise, and patience,” Ryan Stevens, a former U.S. Marine Corps special operations airstrike coordinator, told Reuters.

Echoing Rezaei’s warning about communications infrastructure, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesperson, Hossein Mohebi, also threatened to target internet cables passing through the Strait of Hormuz if the U.S. launched renewed attacks. Mohebi further warned Monday that another U.S. military operation would trigger a global energy crisis. “If America takes a new action—even a limited one—the world will face a serious energy crisis,” he told the Tehran Times.

Rezaei did not rule out targeting energy infrastructure in Gulf states as a retaliatory measure. “If the U.S. strategy is to prolong the war while using neighboring countries’ energy infrastructure to offset the pressure arising from Hormuz and maintain the blockade of Iran, those governments should not assume they can participate in economic warfare against Iran without putting themselves at risk,” he said. “The message is not that Iran wants to destroy the Persian Gulf’s energy system. The message is that there can be no arrangement in which Iran’s economic lifelines come under attack while the economic architecture enabling those attacks is considered untouched and immune.”

The senior Iranian official said Trump’s approach to Iran has been focused on short-term objectives that are often disconnected from geopolitical realities or core U.S. interests, likening him to a day trader. “The wartime secrecy surrounding military operations has given him and his family exclusive and extraordinary access to information regarding forthcoming actions and the state of the markets—access that benefits only those closest to him,” he said.

The Iranians quoted seem to have sized up Trump accurately, especially the part describing him and his family as war profiteers and likening him to a day trader. Trump is very short-sighted and such people are prone to impulsive actions that hold out the promise of a successful outcome, even when knowledgeable people warn that the odds are small. So one cannot rule out the possibility of him doing something rash if he feels that it will help him, even if that expectation is based on nothing more than a hunch

What is also worrying is what he will do if the polls are borne out and he and the Republicans suffer humiliating defeats. There is no telling what he will do in his impotent fury, since he may now feel that he has nothing left to lose in his lame-duck period.