This weekend the Obama Administration has abandoned the last shreds of the pretext of diplomacy, and top officials familiar with the situation say that they are now being direct about the idea of ousting the Assad regime from Syria militarily.

According to those officials, the White House is now holding daily “high-level” meetings about ways to aid the various rebel factions in the Syrian Civil War, as well as contingency planning for their own military action to seize Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal.

The “chemical weapons” invasion talk comes despite Pentagon officials heading to Israel late last week to try to talk them out of an invasion on the exact same pretext. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated today that Israel is “ready” for such an invasion.

The Pentagon argument against an Israeli invasion centered around concern that an Israeli attack would shift popular opinion within Syria overwhelmingly in favor of Assad as a foil to the foreign invaders and the Western-backed rebels. Interestingly officials don’t seem to notice that the exact same argument applies to a US intervention.

The sudden Obama Administration interest in intervention also comes just a week after claims from pro-rebel lobbyists that President Obama had told them he wasn’t going to be able to intervene directly until after the US election in November.

The narrative surrounding what the US is or isn’t going to do to impose a regime change in Syria isn’t necessarily following a straight line, but this endgame is largely in keeping with the Obama Administration’s recent strategy of feigning interest in a diplomatic solution while undermining it until it finally collapses, then insisting they are reluctantly moving toward unilateral action, a strategy Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been very open about using against Iran, bragging that the “negotiations” were only being used to forward sanctions, while other officials said that the sanctions were also going to eventually fail, leading to a full scale war.