Riyadh and The Midterms Join the Battlefield
(4 pm Eastern Time)
The Houthis hit the passenger terminals at Riyadh's international airport yesterday. Saudi authorities report 12 dead and 309 injured, the deadliest attack on any Gulf Arab country since the war began. It was the third strike on King Khalid International Airport in a week. The Wall Street Journal reports direct hits on two buildings of the domestic terminal complex. This evening another projectile struck Terminal 4, a passenger terminal, injuring more people. The toll is still rising.
India says one of its citizens has died of wounds from yesterday's attack. The Houthis have declared Saudi airspace a zone of military operations and warned everyone away from Saudi airports, and their media chief boasted that they had shut down Riyadh's international airport. Every major player in the region (minus Iran) condemns the attack. Suddenly, the airport is the center point of this sprawling war.
I wonder whether the Houthis achieved greater precision or simply got lucky. Lucky would actually be the more hopeful answer. A lucky hit is a fluke. If they can now hit fixed targets with precision at that range, the threat goes to another level, and they can probably do it again.
There is a third possibility. Regional officials told the AP last month that Saudi Arabia is running low on interceptors and had asked France, Britain, Pakistan and Egypt for air defense help. A thinner shield makes every launch more dangerous. Iranian technical assistance could have contributed, although the available reporting establishes no advisory role in this particular strike. The attack on the Saudi East-West pipeline I covered several days ago, launched from Iraq, exploited the same general advantage of stationary infrastructure.
The terminal hit also raises the possibility of a change in emphasis. Earlier Houthi strikes this week heavily damaged a Saudi airliner and killed four people, including a pilot. This one reached the buildings full of passengers and airport workers. European aviation regulators had already flagged a greater Houthi focus on aviation infrastructure. If the Houthis have shifted their targeting from the airport's aircraft to the buildings around them, the Saudis have an intolerable problem.
Saudi air power is still operating. The Houthis reported further strikes on Sanaa today. The Saudi-led coalition calls the airport attack a war crime and has vowed a decisive response, and Riyadh is seeking help from its partners. More than 600 flights have been canceled and the airport remains closed. The capital's schools have moved online, while airlines and travelers face continuing disruption.
Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates rescued 22 crew members from a burning oil tanker in the Gulf. The UAE says they received first aid and were in stable condition. It identified neither the ship nor the cause of the fire. The IRGC separately announced that a supertanker had struck a mine while attempting to leave Hormuz through an unauthorized southern route with its navigation systems switched off. Whether those reports concern the same vessel remains unclear as of this post.
A day earlier, a projectile set the Panama-flagged tanker Gem No. 2 on fire off the UAE coast, and earlier in the week another tanker was hit off Qatar. On Friday the IRGC said it struck the LPG carrier NV Sunshine on what it calls the illegal route along the Omani coast. This afternoon a projectile hit a tanker heading outbound through the strait. In my last post Saudi tankers went dark to survive Bab el-Mandeb. In Hormuz, by the IRGC's account, going dark is what gets you mined.
This is especially noteworthy since, on October 7, while in Athens, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced, "The Straits of Hormuz are open." He described oil movement as approaching its prewar level and concluded regarding Iran, "So they've lost complete control of the Straits." Really?
First of all, this is a rather astonishing admission. Rubio concedes that Iran had control of the Strait. You can't lose something you didn't have to start with. Ooops.
It is true that at the end of September the flow of oil had greatly improved. But the decline in commercial traffic through the Strait had already begun before Rubio spoke. Kpler's figures, reported by Reuters, showed only seven commodity vessels crossing on Tuesday, October 6, the fewest since July 23, and ten on Wednesday. Crude movement had fallen 27 percent in a week, to about 10.1 million barrels a day.
Kpler's weekly average through October 7 was lower still, 8.5 million barrels a day, about 40 percent below normal. Maritime security sources counted at least 12 attacks on tankers around the Strait between September 28 and October 5, the most of any week in the war. Though Iran seems to be in trouble, this is not what a complete loss of control looks like.
Why parade Rubio out to make an absurd claim? The midterms. Trump made the electoral timing explicit the next day. On Truth Social he wrote that the United States would not attack Iran at any time before election day, November 3. That pledge came after the White House had reportedly asked the Pentagon for strike options it could use before the vote. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that 60% of Americans, including one in four Republicans, disapprove of Trump's handling of Iran.
His base has been unwavering through an extraordinary amount of absurdity over the years. But MAGA doesn't like this war. They never wanted to go to war in the first place. Even Tucker Carlson calls it a mistake and told NPR that Trump should have been removed from office under the 25th Amendment for threatening nuclear war on Iran. Though nothing will come of that, it defines a political danger Trump understands. He has put the election into his own description of when additional military action might occur. (After the vote, so as to placate his base.)
But the Saudis are asking for help against the Houthis now, pronto. After yesterday's airport strike, Trump was asked whether the United States would join the Saudi strikes. "We may. We're going to look at it." Whatever he decides, the electoral calculation is visible. The midterms have become part of the battlefield.
Iran has a reason to wait. If Republicans lose badly, the IRGC can claim a victory of sorts. I expect serious, substantive bargaining to wait until the votes are tallied. Today Mohsen Rezaei, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, called the American response to Iran's seven conditions for reopening Hormuz "insufficient." He said Iran is "no longer in the process of responding to the Americans," and that the strait will stay shut and no negotiations will take place until the conditions are met. Proposals can still circulate. Mediators can visit. Officials can announce “productive discussions.” All of that can happen while nothing diplomatically happens at all.
Mr. 100% has been here before. I already wrote about Trump's total victory declarations. In March he predicted that Hormuz would "open itself at a certain point." After the April ceasefire he told AFP, "Total and complete victory. 100 percent. No question about it." Nearly seven months after the first prediction, Rubio was announcing that Iran had lost control while ships were again hesitating to use the strait.
The United States is also actively enforcing its own blockade. CENTCOM says a fighter struck the stern of the Panama-flagged Ocean Molica, also called Arika Sun, with a precision munition in the Gulf of Oman on Saturday. The ship had departed an Iranian port and ignored repeated warnings, according to the American account. The damage disabled its propulsion. Its crew was unharmed.
Bab el-Mandeb remains contested too. On Friday, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Yemen, Mohammed Al Jaber, posted that the Strait had been cleared of the remnants of the Houthi militia. The Houthis deny losing Mocha, and fighting continues in the heights above it as the government's offensive, poetically dubbed Operation Dawn of Yemen, tries to push through.
Meanwhile the Houthis have tightened their siege of Taiz, Yemen's third-largest city, by cutting its last main road to Aden. The Houthis can afford to lose territory and still retain enough reach to interfere.
Tensions continue inside Iran. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is under pressure from hardline MPs led by Amirhossein Sabeti of the Paydari Front. They registered an impeachment request over his September 22 contact with Steve Witkoff in New York, alleging that he lacked authorization from Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.
Rezaei, the same security chief, said Araghchi had been sent to convey Iran's conditions to the mediators. Araghchi's defenders read that as approval. Tasnim, the IRGC-linked news agency, read the same sentence as proof he had no mandate for direct contact. Witkoff says the talks went through mediators anyway. Another signatory, Hosseinali Hajideligani, accused Araghchi of helping lower American oil prices through his interviews.
Araghchi defended his delegation's conduct during parliamentary questioning. One MP said a recent session with him lasted four and a half hours, during which the IRGC commander phoned Araghchi at least three times. His position remains supported by important figures within the system.
The dispute still exposes competing claims over who can speak, who authorized what and what diplomacy is supposed to accomplish. Iran can preserve a functioning security apparatus while its political institutions argue with one another. Governmental disarray and coercive control coexist in Iran today.
The economic pressure I covered in my previous post continues, with the rial still sliding and inflation above 70%. Oil Minister Mohsen Paknejad resigned on October 5, citing personal reasons, as the blockade brought Iran's oil exports to a halt. September was the first month since Kpler began tracking Iranian exports in 2013 that Iran loaded no crude onto tankers at all.
The IRGC is leading a coordinated campaign against dissidents inside and outside Iran, which a Reuters investigation found runs through the security agencies, the judiciary and state media. Abroad, it threatens family members back home, cancels passports and withholds consular services.
At least 34 people have been executed in connection with January's anti-government protests. On October 5, 25-year-old Alireza Sepahi was hanged in Isfahan hours after marrying his imprisoned fiancée by phone. The machinery of repression survived the bombardment.
The IRGC can be militarily diminished, economically constrained and domestically more powerful at the same time. It can lose some leverage through oil workarounds and preserve other leverage through its regional connections. The Houthis have just demonstrated a much more destructive result in Riyadh. The Saudis continue striking back. Washington continues enforcing the blockade. Tehran has stopped even announcing negotiations.
Washington and Tehran are both watching the calendar. November 3 decides when serious bargaining might start and when the bombing might resume. The Houthis are on a different schedule. They hit Riyadh's airport four times in one week. Twenty-three days to go. Plenty of time to hit more airport facilities in Riyadh and more tankers in Hormuz, now that Iran has "lost complete control" of the Strait.
Why is it every time someone in this administration talks about how "complete" our victory over Iran is things only get worse?
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