"Gunning for a Confrontation" with Syria

"... from the beginning the Obama administration failed to publicly articulate [3]anything approaching a reasonable bargain for the Assad regime and Syrian elites that might have either persuaded them both to move towards a gradual transition or made any rejectionists so obviously irrational that their ability and desire to exercise violence would have been radically diminished (thereby reducing the level of violence and contingency in any forced transition)...
All one seemed to hear and read these past few months about potential ways out was that if the Syrian regime pulled back its forces, expeditiously removed itself from power and publicly or privately broke with its allies Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon, then perhaps some kind of a welcome-home party for the state of Syria could be arranged.
In the absence of a credible, public roadmap though, the Obama administration was—unknowingly (?)—leaving the field almost completely open to a group of analysts from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an array of Beltway columnists, former Bush administration officials and some of the regional pundits they profess to love... Not surprisingly then, from the beginning they have filled Obama’s policy vacuum with what seemed more and more like the only credible game in town: accelerate the collapse of this evil Assad gang. Find the pressure points and squeeze harder, faster, more directly.
But if their original analysis was that the Syrian regime was essentially evil, could not structurally make peace and, in the end, would never relinquish power willingly, then surely their private expectation was that as the pressure they were recommending was ratcheted up, the Syrians would only dig in more, use more violence and force a major confrontation, possibly even along the lines of a civil and/or regional war—all the more so since the existential fate of the Assad regime was increasingly being put at stake all around?... (continue, here)"