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Remember last week? It was supposedly the end of the All Hat, No Brain Cattle era of foreign policy in the Bush Administration, spun so nicely that you'd have thought that the Bushistas had a choice in acting like grown-ups for a change.

Well, diplomacy is, like, so last week. Here's the latest:

If warfare is a violent contest of political will, then cease-fire agreements are its scoreboards. And the Bush Administration wants to make sure that when hostilities are halted in Lebanon, Hizballah's score is a round zero. That's why even as most of the international community clamors for an immediate cease-fire to end the fighting that has so far killed 300 Lebanese (mostly civilians) and 29 Israelis (15 of them civilians), the U.S. is dragging its feet — as a matter of policy. While other Western and Arab powers will engage players from Hizballah and the Lebanese government to Iran and Syria, the U.S. remains key to the diplomatic process — for the simple reason that it is the only one capable of persuading Israel to accept a truce. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice won't head for the region until early next week, a delay calculated to give Israel more time to succeed in its objective of eliminating Hizballah as a military threat. A senior Administration official told CNN Wednesday that the U.S. was giving Israel's military operation time to "defang" Hizballah, saying Rice would press for an end to the fighting only "when conditions are conducive to do so."

How fucked are we? So fucked that the assministration is actually getting good advice these days from Chris Matthews and Pat Buchanan.