Iranian Mullahs Stopped Shouting Death & Started Counting US Seats.

Leave a CommentIranian Mullahs Stopped Shouting Death & Started Counting US Seats.Commentary, Politics

On Tuesday in Tehran, a spokesman for the Guard stood up and handed the American voter a twenty-five-page letter. It was not a cable to the State Department. It was addressed to the people. Change the government. Stop backing Israel. Throw out the men who started this war. If you do that, the letter said, the two countries can live in peace. If you do not, the pain is coming home.

That is as close to an endorsement as a foreign army gets without printing a sample ballot. The party it was written for has not, as of this morning, rushed to the nearest microphone to hand it back.

What the letter actually says

Hossein Mohebbi, the Guard’s spokesman, presented the document on September 29, five weeks before the November 3 midterms. The title is an open letter to the honorable people of the United States. The length is twenty-five or twenty-six pages, depending on which copy you count. The argument is simple and old.

The president is a liar, the letter says, and a man whose only motive is money. American security and the lives of servicemen have been handed to him. The nuclear program in Iran is peaceful, and Washington has hidden that fact. The Guard itself has never, in its telling, committed a single verifiable act of violence against civilians. Support for Israel caused the war. Voters who dislike all of this are not powerless. They empowered the government with their votes, and they can take the power back.

One line is worth keeping: remove from power the evil, deceitful, and violent politicians responsible for America’s current state. Another warns that if the course does not change, people around the world will set fire to American interests, and a massive economic earthquake will hit ordinary households. A third says any politician who thinks he can buy a vote for five thousand dollars is unfit to lead.

Mohebbi told reporters he did not expect the letter to change the administration’s behavior. He did think voters might hear it. That is the whole strategy in one sentence. Skip the White House. Talk to the precinct.

Why they think it is a good idea

The Guard is not confused about American parties. It has a memory.

A Democratic president signed the nuclear bargain that unfroze money and bought the program time. A Republican president tore it up, and this Republican president opened a war on February 28 that is now in its eighth month. The Guard’s navy has been chewed up. Its missile plants have been hit. Its oil no longer clears the strait in any volume that matters. A treasury secretary in Washington has been counting the last barrels and calling it a funeral. Frozen accounts are the chip Tehran keeps asking for. A Congress that will not fund the war, will not fund Israel, and will not sustain the blockade is the only off-ramp that does not look like surrender.

They have also been watching the primaries. The Senate nominee in Michigan ran against the establishment favorite on a promise to pull back military support for Israel and won by a point. In New York and Colorado, challengers who would not condemn the October 2023 massacre, or who called it the fruit of apartheid, knocked off sitting members of the same party. The Guard does not need a seminar to read that. A party whose own voters are elevating that wing is a party that might, in January, put a hand on the money.

There is a third reason, and it is the honest one. They are losing the shooting war and the oil war, and words are what they have left. The letter claims a decisive victory. Spokesmen for losing armies always do. A force that has to write twenty-five pages to the enemy’s voters is not a force that thinks the next missile will settle it.

The poll they are betting on

They are not inventing the opening. One national survey this month found only 31 percent of Americans support the war launched in February. On the generic ballot for Congress, the other party is ahead. An Emerson reading of likely voters on September 21 and 22 had it 53 to 42. A broader average of recent surveys sits around eight points. Another shop had the lead down to five. Five weeks out, that is a real advantage, and it was built before any letter from Tehran.

War fatigue is part of that number. Prices are part of it. The ordinary midterm gravity that pulls against the party in the White House is part of it. The Guard is trying to climb onto a wave that was already moving, and to tell the people riding it that Tehran is on their side.

Whether it moves a single precinct

It will not, not as persuasion.

Americans do not read twenty-five-page letters from foreign militaries. The ones who would be flattered by it were already going to vote that way. The ones who remember the Guard’s record — the roadside bombs that killed American soldiers in Iraq, the proxies, the hangings at home, the “death to America” chant that this letter is trying to retire for a news cycle — will treat it as a confession. A State Department man called it a smokescreen the next day. He was right about the motive and late to the politics.

The damage is not in the text. It is in the photograph. A party five weeks from an election has been handed a compliment by the army it spent a decade trying not to call a terrorist force, and the public record so far shows no stampede to refuse it. Silence is a choice. In a year when the same party’s Senate nominee in a toss-up state built his primary on cutting Israel and its House newcomers treat the Jewish state as the villain of the last three years, silence reads as recognition.

Republicans will run the letter. They should. It is short, it is in English, and it names the policy — end the war, end the aid, change the government — that a slice of the other party has already adopted in its own voice. Foreign endorsements rarely convert. They clarify. This one clarifies who, in Tehran, thinks a Democratic Congress is the way out of a war they cannot win on the water.

What to watch

Watch who rejects it by name before November 3, and who changes the subject. A rejection costs nothing and settles the question. A hedge settles it the other way.

Watch the war vote, if one comes. The letter is a lobby. It wants a House or a Senate that will not write the next check. That is a legislative fact, not a vibe. If the other party takes a chamber, the Guard will have its off-ramp hearing whether or not a single American read page twelve.

And watch the boast age. They told the voter the nuclear work is peaceful, the Guard has never touched a civilian, and the war is already won. None of those sentences survives contact with the last twenty years, or with the last eight months. A party that lets that stand as a friendly note has told the country something about its own stomach. The ballot will say whether the country was listening.