‘October surprise’?

Many people have expressed a concern that in the run-up to next Tuesday’s election, the Bushites might be tempted to launch an “October surprise” in the form of some militarily spectacular action … with the most “popular” targets for such a “Wag the Dog” exercise being identified as either (1) Fallujah or (2) some portion of the Iranian nuclear complex.
A number of friends have asked my evaluation of such fears. They are not totally baseless or irrational. In 1981, the context in which Menachem Begin launched the military attack against Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor was precisely the context of a hard-fought election at home. In fact, from the many years I lived in and have been concerned by Lebanon, I can tell you that nearly every election inside Israel was–until PM Barak finally withdrew his troops from this country in 2000– prefaced by the sitting government in Israel launching some extremely lethal new escalation against this poor benighted neighbor.
(And people wonder why many Arabs have a jaded view of Israel’s “democracy”?)
I don’t under-estimate for a minute the degree to which Bush and many people in his entourage take many of their political and military cues from their friends in Israel. Nor do I under-esimate the “native political wiliness” of a person like Karl Rove, whose willingness to resort to electoral dirty tricks has in the past known almost no bounds.
Having said all that, though, I think a Bush-team-generated “October surprise” of the above-mentioned kind is quite unlikely this time around. And for that, I think we have largely the good sense of the Spanish electorate to thank…


Remember how mad the Spanish voters got when they thought that Bush buddy Jose-Maria Aznar was trying to make political capital out of a (genuine) national security crisis in their country?
Now I’m assuming that Aznar is a politically smart guy, who thought he knew his people, and therefore thought it would “play well” for his election campaign when he tried to blame the horrific Madrid train bombings on the Basque separatists (as a way of diverting attention from any possibility that the bombs might have been linked to his toadying policy toward Bush’s military outrage in Iraq).
But did he miscall it!
Popular unease over Aznar’s policy toward Iraq was already at such a high point that when the Spaniards saw him dodging and weaving and trying to sow internal contention at home rather than admit to the unpopularity of his Iraq policy… that his ploy ended up swinging the critical mass of public opinion against him.
Now okay. I know that many of the circumstances surrounding the posssibility of the Bushies launching a militaristic “October surprise” within the next six days would be very different. But I’m assuming two things. One, that the Bush team has examined what happened to Aznar very carefully indeed. And two, that they realize that popular unease among the US electorate with regard to the country’s military stance in Iraq is at such a high point that they could not with any degree of assurance necessarily predict that a militaristic “surprise” would turn voters in Bush’s favor.
At this point, indeed, it might even have the same effect as what happened in those last crucial pre-election days in Spain, and turn voters massively against the Prez.
Okay, I know this is Helena writing this, not Karl Rove. I am trying to make it Helena stripped of any wishful thinking; just the cool analytical Helena. But even then, I realize I probably think differently from that nasty-minded risk-taker Karl Rove.
But I still think that launching an “October surprise” at this point would be too big a risk even for Rove to take.

22 thoughts on “‘October surprise’?”

  1. I also think it’s unlikely for logistical reasons, but I would not go so far as this person, who thinks the Iranians are equipped with super duper anti ship missiles which could cream the US fleet:
    http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7147.htm
    On the other hand, I reject the theory of some radical Sunnis that Iran is working hand in glove with the US in Iraq. This is why I questioned Riverbend’s story about the Badrists framing the Zarqawi group for bombings, and suggested that the reverse was likelier. The people who are really behind the atrocities are people who expect to benefit from US-backed martial law, not people who expect to lose by it.

  2. Helena,
    I think we have an unlikely person to thank: Tony Blair. The Brits have made it clear they are opposed to an Iranian adventure. My feeling is he told Bush: invade Iran and we are gone from Iraq tomorrow. That would do it. (Such leverage is probabaly why he okayed the troop redeployment.)

  3. Better check this morning’s New York Times:
    “CAMP FALLUJA, Iraq, Oct. 22 – A military offensive by American and Iraqi forces to reclaim rebel-held Falluja is probably inevitable and would be the largest and potentially the riskiest since the end of major combat in May 2003, senior American officers say.”
    That doesn’t mean this’ll happen pre-election, of course, but I would never put ANYthing past Karl Rove’s amoral brainpan.
    Somehow, Bush has to remind the American public that it must be afraid – very afraid.

  4. The unstated assumption, of course, is that the Bushies think they can win by playing it straight. This is far from clear. In fact, many of us are suspicious of the polls and how they are being reported, and my own sense is that Bush is a fairly heavy underdog at this point. If Rove & company agree, watch out!

  5. Mike has it exactly right. There have been a lot of reports that many polls unfairly weight the votes against poor and minority voters (even more than they used to). I would be surprised if someone in the Republican campaign hasn’t taken at least one poll with the blinders off to see how things really look. If they don’t like what they see, if they think a fair election means almost certain defeat, what will they resort to?
    At least some election fraud seems inevitable, as does a large amount of voter harrassment on election day. But if this doesn’t guarantee a victory, if they are truly desparate, how far will they go?
    Remember, this is a life-or-death issue for these people. If Kerry is elected, all of the sealed records from the Reagan-Bush period will come out. There could be serious investigations of things like the Valerie Plame leak and the secret documents given to AIPAC. People now in power could be facing real jail time if they lose.
    How much are they willin to risk?

  6. Republicans do seem to have taken the poll with the blinders off — and discovered the only way they can win is to suppress the votes of people of color.
    This from Kevin Drum:
    http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_10/005002.php
    THE MINORITY VOTE….Hmmm. Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio has just finished a survey of 12 battleground states and finds Bush and Kerry tied with 47% of the vote apiece. But when he weights for minority turnout based on the 2000 exit polls, Kerry is ahead 49.2%-45.7%. And when he further updates the weighting to take into account the most recent census results, Kerry is ahead 49.9%-44.7%.
    As Fabrizio blandly puts it, “It is clear that minority turnout is a wildcard in this race and represents a huge upside for Sen. Kerry and a considerable challenge for the President’s campaign.” More accurately, if Fabrizio is right

  7. Helena : As a member of the IISS you might like to comment on this – excuse the all caps format, that’s the way Yigal Carmon & Co like to do things. Since the word ‘terrorist’ is notoriously elastic, the numbers look like gibberish to me :
    October 22, 2004
    IN ITS ANNUAL REPORT, THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STRATEGIC STUDIES SAID EUROPE HAS BECOME MORE VULNERABLE THAN THE U.S. TO TERRORIST ATTACKS BECAUSE OF WEAK SECURITY, PROXIMITY TO THE MIDDLE EAST, AND THE INCREASE IN THE ACTIVITIES OF AL-QA

  9. Yes, I know … but the IISS story sounds quite worthy of attention … I’m not sure which ‘Annual Report’ Colonel Carmon and his friends are quoting from, since the IISS ‘Strategic Survey’ comes out in May …
    Incidentally, the people who really make me go “uuuuuuuuffffffff!” are DEBKAfile. They practice something I call “pre-emptive psy-war”. Don’t ask, it’s horrible …

  10. On the IISS study, Europe is by definition more vulnerable that the US to terrorism. It has a larger population, more openness, dozens of countries (and so dozens of borders), my heterogenous populations, it’s own internal terrorist groups (ETA), etc. Saying it is more vulnerable is hardly news.
    The more relevant point of that report is that Al Queda, which is not the entirety of the radical Islamic movement, is beleived to have 18,000 members or active supporters. So Bush’s claim to have taken down 3/4ths of the leadership seems, like so many Bush claims, to be complete hogwash.

  11. Seems like any subject has an apropos for Helena to smear Israel and the late Menachem Begin. The Osirak reactor attack timing was dictated by the fact that it was days away from going live, and any subsequent attack would have had nuclear side-effects. The proof that it was not electorally related is that Begin consulted the opposition leader, Shimon Peres, and got his agreement on the necessity to do that. The attack was further timed on a week-end, to minimize human casualties as the installation was virtually deserted.
    The Madrid attack is a fine example of electoral influence by Al Qaeda, and coward submission by the Spaniard voters to the will of islamic extremists. Spaniards have forgotten that the last time the let islam take over their country it took them 600 years to get them out…Talk about occupation!
    David

  12. I am finally convinced, after several years of fence sitting, that Al Qaeda, Zarqawi, & co. are US constructs. They have a splendid habit of popping up exactly where the US wants them to, issuing a challenge, performing an atrocity or two, and then vanishing. If it wasn’t for them, the US would be rather too obviously engaged in mass slaughters of inoffensive civilians, don’t you think?
    Someone has just calculated that every ‘terrorist threat’ increases support for the Bush Administration by 2.5%:
    Study: Terror Warnings Up Approval Ratings
    By WILLIAM KATES
    Associated Press Writer
    10/26/04 “AP” — SYRACUSE, N.Y. — When the government issues a terror warning, the president’s approval rating increases an average of nearly three points, a Cornell University sociologist says.
    “The social theories predict it, and anecdotally we know it to be true. Now we have statistical science to confirm it,” said Robb Willer, assistant director of Cornell’s Sociology and Small Groups Laboratory.
    On average, a terror warning prompted a 2.75 point increase in President George Bush’s approval rating the following week, said Willer, who published his study in Current Research in Social Psychology, a peer-reviewed online journal.
    Robert Greene, a professor of history and communication at Cazenovia College, said he did not doubt the correlation, but considered the small increase barely noteworthy.
    “And I would think any benefit would be very temporary. Americans like crises to be solved,” said Greene.
    Willer said he took up his study in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks after watching Bush’s approval rating soar from 51 percent on Sept. 10 to 86 percent five days later.
    Willer tracked the 26 times that a federal agency reported an increased threat of terrorist activity — not just changes in the alert level — between February 2001 and May 2004. He compared that with the 131 Gallup Polls conducted during the same period.
    “From the perspective of social identity theory, threats of attacks from foreigners increase solidarity and in-group identification among Americans, including feelings of stronger solidarity with their leadership,” he said.
    Terror warnings increased presidential approval ratings “consistently,” Willer said. However, he said he was unable to measure how long the increase lasted.
    On the Net: http://www.uiowa.edu/%7Egrpproc/crisp/crisp10_1.pdf
    Copyright

  13. Rowan says : “I am finally convinced, after several years of fence sitting, that Al Qaeda, Zarqawi, & co. are US constructs.”
    Sure, and the koranic underpinnings of their ideology must have been written recently by a Hollywood ghostwriter, backdated and attributed to Muhammad & co, right?
    Whatever fence Rowan was sitting on had some ill effects on his sanity.
    E. Bilpe

  14. My argument is not that your friends in Hollywood wrote the Qur’an, Mr Bilpe. It is that Bin Laden, Zarqawi, & co., like Hamas and the Ikhwan al Muslimin, are Qutbist modernisers who wish for nothing better than to convert the entire Muslim culture zone into an integrated theocracy which they can sell to the highest bidder. You might find the writings of Shaykh Abdalqadir as Sufi on this subject interesting. He despises the West and its usurers, but he despises the Qutbists even more. See:
    http://www.shaykhabdalqadir.com

  16. Aha… well, I’ll tell you what he might read and even enjoy : it’s a rather good history of ‘Islamism-as-a-Western-stalking-horse’ (that’s my own phrase), written by someone who appears to be a Larouchean Pre-Millennialist :
    http://www.redmoonrising.com/Ikhwan/Clash.htm
    — the only element in it which I object to is the references to the work of “Dr John Coleman, ex-MI6”, whom I regard as a complete imposter. Most of the other sources are sound, though.

  17. At this point, indeed, it might even have the same effect as what happened in those last crucial pre-election days in Spain, and turn voters massively against the Prez.
    Or maybe not – the US electorate is different, and has a greater sense of its own importance than the Spanish, who have already seen their empire come and go, and actually opposed their own government’s involvement in Iraq (the Spanish army is mostly a conscript army, btw), and whoever did Madrid knew that it would make the people think “I told you so”, and kick out the party that got them into Iraq.
    In the US neither candidate is in favour of an immediate pullout from Iraq, and Kerry has talked of going after al-Qa’ida rather than making up excuses to go into other countries. So it’s unlikely that OBL and the gang want Kerry to win, and I’m quite sure they don’t want to see anything resembling conciliation in Palestine either.

  18. Yusuf, I was quite baffled by the collapse of the Spanish government until I recalled that what brought it down was not the attack and the ultimatum per se, but the fact that it assumed wrongly that it could blame the attack on its real betes noires, the Basques.
    Perhaps there is a tacit understanding between the Imperial nations that they can use ‘Islamist guerrilla’ attacks to strengthen their general security stance, but that using them to target extraneous enemies is a sort of menace to the larger ‘war against terror’ scenario, and not to be tolerated. In other words, the other Imperial nations may have felt that the Aznar government needed to be made an example of.

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