Is he bluffing? I still really can't believe that even Trump will follow-through on these threats. Sill plenty of time for a TACO. But Hegseth's scheduled presser for 8:30 AM today was cancelled last night, so who knows. Perhaps he's preparing to launch the attack.

We'll find out soon enough.

In one of the other discussions, Dope1 made a comment that stuck with me. He analogized Iran to a neighborhood thug, and described the appropriate response as:

"I said "tune him up" which means "kick his a$$ hard enough that he learns his lesson or finds other targets to prey on". Either outcome is acceptable."

That's sort of the standard remedy for dealing with a schoolyard bully or a neighborhood thug, where you might expect that the target's response will be one of those two things: learn their lesson or leave you alone and prey on someone else. But if the target is a hardened criminal, or a genuinely evil person, or not rational, they might not have one of those two responses. They might just take the hit and then escalate themselves.

Iran has shown that they can take a punch, metaphorically. They've spent the last 47 years hardening their regime to be able to withstand these kinds of assaults and remain in power. If they believe that they can similarly survive whatever the next phase of bombing is, they very well might let this ultimatum deadline pass. And I'm not sure we have a Plan B for what happens if we "tune up" Iran but they don't change their ways. Right now, it sure seems like the strategy was "surely at some point they'll sue for peace or lose control of the country without us having to invade with ground troops." Maybe that eventually works out, but I think the regime knows as well as we do that all they have to do is outlast the air war and not worry about a ground invasion.

As for the imminent attack, don't rule out Trump's other alternative - to simply lie. Or engage in strategic ambiguity, if you will. He can simply say that Iran has come to the table begging for peace ("Sir! Please don't bomb us back to the Stone Age, Sir!"), so he's giving another X days to let the negotiators work it out. Then he can declare victory and leave in X days while being able to claim he wasn't balked.