BUCKLE IN.

It's the opening week for the United Nations in New York, with many leaders of member countries showing up to preen for the cameras and use their diplomatic immunity to make Manhattan traffic even more gridlocked.  After that, Noah Rothman suggests, things could get tense.  "At that point, the Iranian regime will not be flat broke, but it will be strapped enough that it will have to triage its resources or further inflate the currency — putting salaries in the pockets of regime officials, soldiers, and proxies at the expense of the rial’s value."

There's still nobody in charge in Iran.  The best their senior negotiators can come up with is "we'll talk if you concede all our demands."

Iran is signalling it is ready to end the war with the United States, based on the framework agreement concluded in June, according to its top security coordinator Mohsen Rezaee.

The secretary general of Iran's powerful National Security Council told Arab TV channel Al Jazeera on Saturday that conditions were an end to the war on all fronts, the release of frozen assets and an end to the US naval blockade. These points are included in the framework agreement with the US.

Rezaee also stated that Iran was seeking an end to the war between the Houthi militia in Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

A "memorandum of understanding" is nowhere near the draft of a treaty, but I digress, and the mullahs' gangsters didn't honor the few things they were supposed to honor almost from the beginning.

Town Hall's Kevin McCullough notes, "Nothing but Hard Choices Await."  That memorandum of understanding is a dead letter.  The current occasional exchanges of missiles is unlikely to work out to the mullahs' benefit.  "Iran is under enough military and economic pressure right now that it either escalates dramatically, tries to ride out the pain, or eventually implodes from within."  Finishing them should they escalate, even if only a little, is not going to be easy.  "The Gulf states meeting with Trump on Tuesday have their own stakes in which way he goes, and their read of the room may end up shaping his decision as much as anything happening on the battlefield."