"The White House is still in contemplation mode but the planning is moving forward and it's more advanced than it's ever been," one of the administration officials said.
The online publication reported that the White House had requested that US agencies consider a shift in policy toward directly arming the anti-Assad militias and recognizing the "rebels" as Syria's legitimate government. It also noted that upcoming "Eager Lion" military exercises bringing 15,000 US and NATO troops, along with those of other US-aligned countries, to Jordan would provide the means of pre-positioning US military hardware for a Syrian intervention.
These preparations give the lie to the pretense that Secretary of State John Kerry is working with his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, to ensure a successful peace conference next month in Geneva.
While the Syrian regime has indicated its willingness to attend a meeting aimed at reaching a political settlement of the two-year-old war, there is no indication that the "rebels" are prepared to do likewise, nor for that matter that they have any coherent leadership capable of negotiating such an agreement.
The Syrian National Coalition, the rebel front backed by Washington, has spent the last five days holding a fractious conference in Istanbul. Attempts by the Western powers to lend the body a more acceptable veneer by incorporating a handful of secular opponents of the Assad regime have been repeatedly rejected by the opposition's Muslim Brotherhood-dominated leadership.
While the Obama administration and its allies are prepared to recognize the coalition as the "legitimate representative" of the Syrian people and even the country's provisional government, it has become increasingly obvious that it has no significant popular support.
As the Abu Dhabi daily the National noted recently, the coalition's secretary general, Saudi Arabian-based businessman Mustafa Al Sabbagh, was given his post after appearing at the group's founding in Doha last November with 16 people he claimed were representatives of regional councils from across Syria.
"In fact many of them were his employees in Saudi Arabia, or his relatives," the paper reported.
The crisis of the so-called rebels and the reversals the Islamist militias have suffered recently in combat with the Syrian army have only served to escalate the US and Western European preparations for direct intervention. Washington and its allies are determined to pursue their war for regime change as part of a broader strategy for redrawing the map of the entire region to serve their own predatory interests.
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