THE Obama administration has reached an ignominious impasse on Syria. Administration spokesmen now publicly recognize that the United Nations diplomatic initiative it has backed for the past seven weeks has been a failure. They acknowledge — as they should have long ago — that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has no intention of ending violence against his opposition, or meeting any other condition of the “Annan plan.”

Yet President Obama refuses to embrace other options. His administration’s strategy is one of militant passivity: Officials say they are waiting for UN envoy Kofi Annan to agree with them that his diplomacy has failed, and to say so to the UN Security Council. They are waiting for the Russian regime of Vladi­mir Putin, which has been pummeling its own pro-democracy movement in the streets of Moscow, to be shamed into abandoning its support for the Assad dictatorship. And they are waiting for the Syrian opposition — which is either in exile or under relentless assault from tanks and artillery — to metamorphose into a coherent alternative with detailed plans for governance.
This strategy will allow Mr. Assad to go on killing indefinitely. Mr. Annan, after all, describes his plan as the only alternative to a Syrian civil war, so he is unlikely to abandon it any time soon. More than 1,000 men, women and children have died since Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations, declared the Annan plan “the best way to end the violence.” — Excerpts from The Washington Post editorial