I'm confused again.

Ed Cone (via Glenn Reynolds) linked to the official website of the Randi Rhodes Show, which yesterday had a comment about Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, directly followed by a comment about the Israel/Hezbollah war:

Bush puppet/Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki spouts White House talking points sprinkled with Islam to a joint session of Congress.

Kofi Annan: UN observers were deliberately attacked and killed by Israel. WTF?!

I'm glad I'm not a war blogger, but sometimes I feel guilty about neglecting my war coverage. I just don't have access to inside information of the sort which might enable me to comment even in a semi-coherent manner about battlefield decisions, troop movements, enemy strength, etc. (Of course if I did, I probably wouldn't comment at all, so there's a bit of a paradox in all this.)

But I can certainly make a stab at trying to make sense out of someone else's analysis. Or (as in this case) not.

I'll start with al-Maliki's "White House talking points." I'm assuming that the Randi Rhodes analyst is on the left, and that he or she therefore must have taken into account not only Prime Minister al-Maliki's actual remarks, but the widely-reported left-wing criticism of them:

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) -- Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean on Wednesday called Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki an "anti-Semite" for failing to denounce Hezbollah for its attacks against Israel.

Al-Maliki has condemned Israel's offensive, prompting several Democrats to boycott his address to a joint meeting of Congress and others to criticize him. Dean's comments were the strongest to date.

"The Iraqi prime minister is an anti-Semite," the Democratic leader told a gathering of business leaders in Florida. "We don't need to spend $200 and $300 and $500 billion bringing democracy to Iraq to turn it over to people who believe that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself and who refuse to condemn Hezbollah."

So I am still confused. Unless Howard Dean is covertly suggesting that anti-Semitism is a White House talking point, something does not make sense.

Fortunately, my job does not require me to make sense of the Randi Rhodes Show, or its analysts.

As to the assertion by Kofi Annan that "UN observers were deliberately attacked and killed by Israel," Belmont Club's Wretchard has devoted an extensive analysis to that, and it's pretty clear that the troop positions of UNIFIL (the UN group) and Hezbollah are very close together, and that Israel has had a very tough time avoiding accidentally hitting UNIFIL. Wretchard also quotes from this statement from a CBC radio interview with a Canadian general (which can be streamed at LGF):

We received emails from him a few days ago, and he was describing the fact that he was taking fire within, in one case, three meters of his position for tactical necessity, not being targeted. Now that’s veiled speech in the military. What he was telling us was Hezbollah soldiers were all over his position and the IDF were targeting them. And that’s a favorite trick by people who don’t have representation in the UN. They use the UN as shields knowing that they can’t be punished for it.

The U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, or UNIFIL, was created and dispatched to that country after terrorists from Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization entered Israel and hijacked a bus and Israel responded. Thirty-six hostages died. Israel's response was to enter south Lebanon to destroy the terrorist base camps.

The U.N.'s response was to adopt Resolution 425, which, naturally, called for Israel to withdraw "immediately" and set up UNIFIL for the expressed purpose of "assisting the government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of effective authority to the area." It did such a good job of preventing the PLO from using south Lebanon to attack Israel that in June 1982, Israel felt compelled to launch a full-scale invasion to oust the PLO once and for all.

UNIFIL was there from the 1982 assassination of Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel through the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, both with the involvement of a Syrian government to whom the idea of a strong and truly independent Lebanon was anathema.

UNIFIL was there when Hezbollah, with full Syrian and Iranian complicity, rushed in to fill the political vacuum left by the PLO. When the Israelis withdrew totally from every square inch of Lebanon in 2000, UNIFIL stood by as Hezbollah established its "effective authority" over south Lebanon.

UNIFIL never has done much real peacekeeping; the U.N. reacts only if Israel attempts to defend itself. As former Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Dore Gold notes: "Hezbollah would launch military attacks 50 meters from a U.N. outpost, Israel would shoot back and UNIFIL would protest against the Israeli response."

I'm shocked.

Shocked!

Give peace a chance?

Anyone naive enough to imagine that Nasrallah and Hezbollah want peace -- or have ever wanted peace -- should watch this video.

Yeah, this war-blogging, Rhodes-analyst stuff is a real drag.

But what's the alternative?

Peace blogging?

MORE: The Jerusalem Post points out that Israel indignantly denies targeting UNAFIL deliberately, and demands an investigation of UNAFIL's apparent inseparability from Hezbollah:

Such an investigation must determine more than just how UNIFIL troops were located in such close proximity to Hizbullah terrorists that they ended up in the line of fire. More fundamentally, it would delve into how, in complete contravention of its objectives, UNIFIL stood by without a murmur as a terrorist organization amassed thousands upon thousands of rockets whose unprovoked use has killed and wounded dozens of Israelis and precipitated the current war.

The bitter irony is that Annan himself reported to the Security Council back in January 2001 that UNIFIL had completed implementation of the part of its mandate requiring it to help Lebanese authorities resume control of the area vacated by Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. If he was right, the IDF would not now be operating against Hizbullah, and absorbing mounting casualties. And four UNIFIL workers would not be dead today.

Giving peace a chance!

UPDATE: Via Glenn Reynolds, Captain Ed has an interesting post titled "The Nasrallah Blues." The Israelis have penetrated the sheikh's communications network, and he's being forced to acknowledge the serious shortcomings of his leadership. Says Ed:

Having a commander communicate an apology of this sort indicates a growing dissatisfaction with leadership in the ranks. Nasrallah so far has done nothing to convince anyone that he has a grasp of either strategy or tactics. He has proven that he has no understanding of his enemy, nor much of his putative allies in the region, almost all of whom have declined to rush to his side in this fight.

If Nasrallah survives, I suspect he'll try to claim an Arafat-style "victory." And if this is then spun as a "victory" for peace, who knows? Might there even be a Nobel "Peace" Prize in his future?

UPDATE: THANK YOU GLENN REYNOLDS for linking this post, and welcome all!