LET THE ANKLE-BITING BEGIN.

Our President gave a speech last night that probably changed exactly zero minds.  That might be because everybody who has been paying attention to the dismantling of the mullahs' tyranny is so wedded to his priors that there's no changing minds.  Consider "Trump's Iran Speech" by Outside the Beltway's James Joyner.  "Nineteen minutes. Zero answers."  Which conclusion he validates by citing all the usual founts of Establishmentarian Process Worship, i.e. New York's Times, Washington's Post, National "Public" Radio, The Associated Press (editorial takeaways rather than reporting), Reuters (same gripe), The British Broadcasting Corporation (This is Londonistan).  His complaint?  "While I’ve thought President Trump owed the public more explanation for the war effort than he’d given so far, scheduling a prime time address creates expectations that some major new development will be announced. Simply, as BBC put it, rehashing his social media posts falls well short of that. This was the classic meeting that could have been an email."

Longtime Wise Expert Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic, engages in the predictable fretting.

Americans have been waiting for their president and commander in chief to address the nation and explain why the country is at war. For weeks, Donald Trump has offered only snippets and sound bites about his decision to lead the United States into another conflict in the Middle East; his primetime address this evening was, one assumes, aimed at informing and reassuring the American public.

Maybe he’d have been better off not trying. Trump’s critics (including me) have castigated him for refusing to go on television and provide a comprehensive explanation of the war to the American people. But given his performance this evening, perhaps he had the right instinct. His address did not come across as a wartime speech but instead was a disjointed series of complaints, brags, and exaggerations (along with a few outright lies) delivered by a man who looked and sounded tired. After his 19 minutes on the air—brisk by Trump’s standards—Americans could be forgiven for being even more concerned now than they were only a few days ago.

People more familiar with Our President's schtick will likely recognize in that ramble his usual style.  Mr Nichols, though, would rather elide the mullahs' posturing about having enough fissile material for eleven nukes and trot out the "no immediate threat" canard.

What is America fighting for? Trump insisted that Iran must never be allowed to get a nuclear weapon. Almost no one would disagree with this general point—certainly I don’t—but Trump presented no evidence that Iran was nearing the nuclear threshold. Instead, he simply asserted that the Iranian mullahs were going to get a nuclear weapon and that the United States had to stop them: In other words, he admitted to launching a preventive war based on something that might happen one day.

That the revolutionary guards either had or improvised a longer-range missile to flip at Diego Garcia is something else that if you're a Wise Expert you don't have to contemplate.

In The (Not Detroit) Free Press, Eli Lake offers a less pessimistic perspective.

Trump was gracious to America’s allies in the Middle East. “I want to thank. . . Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain,” Trump said. “They’ve been great, and we will not let them get hurt or fail in any way, shape, or form.” By contrast, Trump expressed mild exasperation with America’s NATO allies. He urged them to join the campaign to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. “Go to the Strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves,” Trump implored. “Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done, so it should be easy.”

America has never had a wartime leader who spoke like that. Just consider his peroration on the unexpected regime change American and Israeli arms have already achieved: “Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death,” he said. “They’re all dead.”

All of this was good news for Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states. They have counseled Trump to stay on his journey until the mission is accomplished. For the nervous markets and isolationists in his own party, Trump does not sound like he intends to TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).

He warned Iran’s remaining leaders that if they did not negotiate a deal, “we are going to hit each and everyone of [your] electric generating plants very hard and probably simultaneously.” He doesn’t want to strike Iran’s oil and gas fields. “But we could hit it and it would be gone. And there’s not a thing they could do about it,” he said.

All of those observations gave Mr Nichols something to grouse about.  He found that "not let them get hurt" troubling in light of the effects of Iran's spray-and-pray missile launches at the Arab states and their deliberate attempts to wreck Tel Aviv.

Finally, Scott Johnson with Power Line concurs with Our President's assessment.  "We hold all the cards."  And he's been holding back on wrecking infrastructure that serves both military and civilian purposes (destroying a power plant that keeps the centrifuges spinning and turning the lights off in Qom is collateral damage, not a war crime) in the hopes of degrading the machinery of repression enough for the various civilian tribes of Iran to throw off their government and reconstitute a civil and commercial society.  Mr Johnson concludes, "We support Epic Fury. For reasons that Trump sketched out, it was overdue. However, we’re not the target audience of this speech."  Whether civilians in Iran, or their expatriate cousins Stateside, are able to read between the lines and determine the time to overthrow the mullahs remains to be seen.

The thing continues to be pressed.