The Myth of the "October Surprise"
A throwaway comment in someone else's journal made me realize the extent to which many Americans have accepted and internalized the myth of the "October Surprise." So I thought I'd talk about it -- what was claimed, what was proven, and why it's almost certainly not only impossible -- but would have been irrelevant to the outcome of the Hostage
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Well, yes. I'm glad to hear someone else say this! :)
Even if the military was up to the job (they weren't, equipment was not desert-ready), the plan struck me as hair-brained. Swoop into the middle of Tehran, locate the hostages and get them out? No way. What are we, the Israelis?
The big flaw was that it was a serial and one-pronged attack. If it had been part of a larger attack, Carter might have failed to rescue the hostages but achieved other objectives (for instance, knocking out the Iranian Air Force and Navy). Carter chose a plan which had only one way to succeed, and many ways to fail.
His failure was the more egregious given his naval background. He could not plead ignorance of such affairs.
Having said that, the 'October Surprise' is no surprise when you consider the players. Carter stood by for how many days during the hostage crisis? Who would of thought Reagan would??? The Iranians didn't.
Indeed. Given that the Iranians were doing something which any US President but Carter would have treated as a blatant act of war, the Iranians knew that a new President would bring the war home to them. That's the most obvious explanation for what happened, and (barring some tremendous new evidence in favor of the conspiracy theory) by far the likeliest.
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