At least Somebody knows what's going on

Three cheers for Mara Liasson. Her co-liberal commentator is always out to lunch on stuff like this, but at least Mara can recognize the situation for what it is.

From the exchange yesterday on Fox News Sunday about Israel's attack in Lebanon that killed a large number of children and other innocents:

KRISTOL: You know, I mean, look. It's a terrible incident. And ironically, it's the same town that, 10 years ago, bombs killed civilians and that ended basically that Israeli attempt to deal with Hezbollah.

I don't know if this will end it or not. I think there will be a lot of second-guessing in Israel. There already is of Olmert's political and military strategy, the failure to go in on the ground, the dependence on air power.

You can't at one and the time say Hezbollah is a mortal threat to the state of Israel, an enemy of western civilization, and then say but we're not going to go in on the ground, we're going to establish a two-kilometer buffer, I don't think, in southern Lebanon.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell them what their military strategy should be. And obviously, they don't want to lose either Israeli lives or the civilian lives that would be lost in a ground campaign. But air power alone is a problem. And it's a bad situation, I think.

I think Hezbollah will end up winning this battle, if you want to put it this way, psychologically and politically. In the global war on terror, Iran will end up as a winner over this last month or six weeks, and that's extremely unfortunate.

WILLIAMS: You're not kidding. That's terrible. And I mean, this has been a very rough week all around. I mean, the U.N. observers, this. I think Secretary Rice had a flame-out in Rome in terms of trying to build an international consensus.

And so it comes back to this idea was the administration wrong to allow Israel carte blanche in saying go ahead, you know, attack Hezbollah without any restraint. And it turns out it seems as if...

HUME: Without any restraint?

WILLIAMS: Without any restraint. At this point, there was the -- the only restraint was that the U.S. said we don't want you, Israel...

HUME: Well, Bill was just talking about...

WILLIAMS: ... to put in ground forces.

LIASSON: Israel put restraints on itself not...

WILLIAMS: I don't know what restraints -- if you look at the devastation, I don't see restraint.
Fred was talking about international opinion being one-sided, but if you look at the statistics in terms of, you know, now close to 500 Lebanese dead, almost a million people have to flee their homes, versus 51 Israelis dead, most of them military people, you'd say well, there's a great imbalance here, Fred.

BARNES: Juan, that's not for lack of Hezbollah trying to kill a lot more of them. Hezbollah is aiming -- that's what they're trying to do. Hezbollah wants to kill civilians. Why do you fire on cities with highly inaccurate rockets...

WILLIAMS: They have inferior military capability to Israel. I mean, there's just no question.

LIASSON: This is a classic example of what they call asymmetric warfare. I mean, there is no difference between Hezbollah and the civilian population. There are people who are civilian one minute, and 10 minutes later they've launched a rocket, and they're back in their home with their wife and kids and then they're civilians again...

WILLIAMS: Correct, and what we're seeing...

LIASSON: ... and they were a Hezbollah fighter for 10 minutes.

Yes, it's really too bad that Hizbollah doesn't have the same level of sophisticated armaments with which to target civilians in Israel.