By Dale McFeatters

Syria may have gone a massacre too far. Over the weekend government-backed thugs, known as shabiha, killed execution-style 108 villagers, most of them women and children and many of them in their own homes.

The Syrian government blamed it on terrorists and foreign extremists, but the town had earlier been shelled by government tanks and artillery, and the claim was quickly belied by gruesome videos of dead children and mass graves posted by anti-regime activists.

There was the predictable, and predictably ineffective, vote of censure by the U.N. Security Council. But the killings greatly increased Syria's growing diplomatic isolation and ostracism. Most of the major nations, including the United States, expelled Syrian diplomats after the massacre.

And even the defense put up by Russia, Syria's staunchest Syrian ally, sounded increasingly lame and half-hearted. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov issued a general warning against using the killings as "a pretext for taking military measures."

Tellingly, Lavrov said Russia didn't care who was in power in Syria, as long as there is an end to the violence and a process underway for Syrians to decide on the future of their country.

The Obama administration has been urging Russia to pressure Syrian President Bashar Assad, a second-generation dictator, to give up his office and leave the country, which Assad has given no evidence of doing or even contemplating.

The fear is that left to itself the fighting will degenerate into an all-out civil war with the fighting spilling over into neighboring nations.

Thus, the stalemate has caused talk to increasingly turn to military intervention. On Fox News this past weekend, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen, Martin Dempsey said he was prepared with military options if the White House should request them. He said those options should be wielded carefully and cautiously but "it may come to a point with Syria because of the atrocities."

Even U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan, who has unsuccessfully tried to broker several ceasefires in Syria, concludes, "We are at a tipping point."

Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service (www.scrippsnews.com).