Some straight talking from Anne Applebaum. Here’s a sample:

“Iran is a large country containing 75 million people, in possession of a large and competent army. We don’t have the men, we don’t have the machines and we don’t have the money to stage an invasion. If we were even to contemplate such a thing, we would have to reduce force levels elsewhere, but where? In Iraq, the policy is to send more troops, the war in Afghanistan isn’t going away anytime soon, and, just as diplomacy there is starting to produce results, this isn’t a great time to start monkeying about with the military balance on the Korean peninsula either…This is one of the most unpopular presidents in recent memory, and he is already fighting an unpopular war. More to the point, his credibility on intelligence matters was damaged – perhaps the better word is “eviscerated” – by the Iraq intelligence debacle, so no one is likely to believe his claims about Iranian nuclear prowess or Iranian anything, whatever the evidence. More to the point, Iran is not Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which had been under UN surveillance for a decade. It is a sovereign state which has relatively normal relations with America’s allies, not to mention China and Russia.”

Read the whole thing.