Plainly, the Syrian tyranny's writ has expired. Assad has implicated his own Alawite community in a war to defend his family's reign. The ambiguity that allowed the Assad tyranny to conceal its minority, schismatic identity, to hide behind a co-opted Sunni religious class, has been torn asunder. Calls for a jihad, a holy war, against a godless lot have been made in Sunni religious circles everywhere.
Ironically, it was the Assad tyranny itself that had summoned those furies in its campaign against the American war in Iraq. It had provided transit and sanctuary for jihadists who crossed into Iraq to do battle against the Americans and the Shiites; it even released its own Islamist prisoners and dispatched them to Iraq with the promise of pardon. Now the chickens have come home to roost, and an Alawite community beyond the bounds of Islam is facing a religious war in all but name.
This schism cannot be viewed with American indifference. It is an inescapable fate that the U.S. is the provider of order in that region. We can lend a hand to the embattled Syrians or risk turning Syria into a devil's playground of religious extremism. Syria can become that self-fulfilling prophesy: a population abandoned by the powers but offered false solace and the promise of redemption by the forces of extremism and ruin.
We make much of the "opaqueness" of the Syrian rebellion and the divisions within its leadership. But there is no great mystery that attends this rebellion: An oppressed people, done with a tyranny of four decades, was stirred to life and conquered its fear after witnessing the upheaval that had earlier overtaken Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen.
In Istanbul this month, I encountered the variety, and the normalcy, of this rebellion in extended discussions with prominent figures of the Syrian National Council. There was the senior diplomat who had grown weary of being a functionary of so sullied a regime. There was a businessman of means, from Aleppo, who was drawn into the opposition by the retrogression of his country.
There was a young prayer leader, from Banyas, on the Syrian coast, who had taken up the cause because the young people in his town had pressed him to speak a word of truth in the face of evil. Even the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Riad al-Shaqfa, in exile for three decades, acknowledged the pluralism of his country and the weakness of the Brotherhood, banned since 1980.
We frighten ourselves with phantoms of our own making. No one is asking or expecting the U.S. Marines to storm the shores of Latakia. This Syrian tyranny is merciless in its battles against the people of Homs and Zabadani, but its army is demoralized and riven with factionalism and sectarian enmities. It could be brought down by defectors given training and weapons; safe havens could give disaffected soldiers an incentive, and the space, to defect.
Meanwhile, we should recognize the Syrian National Council as the country's rightful leaders. This stamp of legitimacy would embolden the opposition and give them heart in this brutal season. Such recognition would put the governments of Lebanon and Iraq on notice that they are on the side of a brigand, lawless regime. There is Arab wealth that can sustain this struggle, and in Turkey there is a sympathetic government that can join this fight under American leadership.
The world does not always oblige our desires for peace; some struggles are thrown our way and have to be taken up. In his State of the Union address last month, President Obama dissociated himself from those who preach the doctrine of America's decline.
Never mind that he himself had been a declinist and had risen to power as an exponent of America's guilt in foreign lands. We should take him at his word. In a battered Syria, a desperate people await America's help and puzzle over its leader's passivity.
