The pretext of diplomacy is over, and the Obama Administration has now decided to be direct about its goal to oust the Assad regime from Syria militarily, according to top officials familiar with the situation.

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, interestingly, comes just days after Pentagon officials were dispatched to Israel to try to talk them out of doing the exact same thing, warning that it would make Assad’s position stronger and foster sympathy domestically for the long-time dictator if Israel just randomly invaded and started looting their arsenal.

Likewise, the discussion of more overt aid to the rebels comes despite lobbyists for those same rebels claiming earlier in the week that President Obama had told them he wasn’t going 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.