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That's what President Obama and his foreign policy advisers have accomplished by sending the Secretary of State on a Middle East trip while our policy toward that region is melting down.

After months of speculation that her role in the formulation of foreign policy has been marginal, her camp surely hoped this voyage - which began in Pakistan before moving on to Israel and a number of Arab nations - would offer the opportunity to showcase her mastery of high-profile policy matters.

Now though, it appears that she is being designated as a sort of ritual scapegoat, bearing the brunt of the anger Obama's incoherent policies are provoking from friend and foe alike.

Back in the spring when Team Obama began its unprecedented campaign to pressure Israel for concessions on building in settlement areas, Clinton became a lightning rod when she offered the bluntest iteration of the policy:

"We want to see a stop to settlement construction - additions, natural growth, any kind of settlement activity - that is what the president has called for."

Now, at a moment when Obama and his inner circle seek to bolster his rock-bottom standing with Israelis (just four percent of whom believe he is pro-Israel), she has provoked "fury" in the Arab world by conceding what any fair-minded observer must - that the concessions Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has offered are "unprecedented."

That's what led to the spectacle of the Secretary of State in an Arab capital "reading from written notes" a statement crafted to undo perceived damage to the Obama administration's standing with Israel's diplomatic adversaries.

That's what led to this startling (at least to Americans sympathetic to Israel) headline in the New York Times: "Clinton Denies Easing Pressure on Israel."

At one time, this would have seemed like a rather remarkable point for this administration to be insisting on - remember that during the campaign, Barack Obama pledged: "When I am President, the United States will stand shoulder to shoulder with Israel."

But by now, we are familiar with the contortions Obama and his team resort to to defend their diplomatic failures. Hillary's humiliation just makes it clear that as those contortions accumulate, the effect is to put our standing on a downward spiral, where words and gestures intended to reassure those on one side of a long-standing divide undercut our standing with the those on the other, ad infinitum.

If - as now seems likely - yesterday's effort at damage control failed to address what Haaretz describes as "worsening friction" between the administration and Mahmoud Abbas' Palestinian Authority, we can expect more pressure on Israel as penance. And as even friendly observers begin to admit that Obama has made a hash of things in the Middle East, we can anticipate more humiliation on the world stage for the former rival he elevated to Secretary of State.

UPDATE (11/5): Secretary Clinton has finally made it back to our shores after extending her trip's Middle East leg in an attempt to "calm Arab concerns," but not before committing two additional gaffes, one perhaps trifling (though a Republican official would be blistered by the liberal media for less) the other much less so. Click through for the unsettling details.