Early on during the NATO intervention in Libya, air-traffic controllers in Cyprus received an unexpected call from two armed fighter jets. The pilots reported that they were out of gas and needed to land. Reluctantly, the Cypriots granted permission, according to military officers who described the incident to me late last year. A pair of Mirage 2000 fighters from Qatar, loaded with weaponry, soon landed at Cyprus’s main civilian airport and taxied to a parking spot amid commercial airliners full of beach tourists. The Qatari pilots, it turned out, were on their way to Italy to join the air war against former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. This was their first military mission; the officers did not know how to seek clearances for warplanes, and they had miscalculated how much fuel they would need.

Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan all participated in the air campaign over Libya. (Jordan did not publicize its action.) They joined an international coalition led by France and Britain, and supported by the United States and the United Nations, that justified its intervention on humanitarian grounds, based upon a “duty to protect” civilians that has evolved as a principle of international law.

Qatar is a Sunni Muslim monarchy whose emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, asserts a divine right to rule. It seems safe to assume, as Hugh Eakin has described, that the expansion of global democratic rights was not among its motivations in the Libyan campaign. The country’s chief of the armed forces, General Hamad bin Ali al-Attiyah, outfitted himself in a C-17 and jetted around the war zone like a swashbuckler, handing out money to rebel factions, including to some Islamists with disturbing agendas. For Qatar, the Libyan intervention seemed akin to its successful bid to host the World Cup in 2022, or its construction of a Formula One racetrack: it was a fun thing for wealthy people to do with their money, certainly better than sitting around in air-conditioned diwans watching the Arab Spring on Al Jazeera. (Al Jazeera is also a disruptive Qatari creation.)

Sheikh Khalifa presides over a tiny native population of only about two hundred and twenty-five thousand people. Like the subjects of a few other smaller Gulf monarchies, such as Kuwait and the U.A.E., native Qataris enjoy the sort of table-topping per-capita income that makes even the most complaining among them more like restive shareholders than potential revolutionaries. So the emirate faces relatively little risk that its flirtation with international human-rights principles might boomerang.

Qatar’s activism, however, has now helped goad the full membership of the Arab League, a previously moribund body, to extend the ideas that guided the Libyan campaign to the case of Syria and the mass killing of civilians by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. This has proved a more complicated endeavor, not only as a matter of geopolitics but also as a forum for action on the basis of principle.

The League has twenty-two member states, including Syria, which has been suspended. Only three League governments—Lebanon, Iraq, and Tunisia—could even be described as shaky sort-of democracies. Two more—Egypt and Libya—may be incubating such constitutional systems. Several softer monarchies—Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait—are liberalizing a little. Otherwise, the League is a club of self-protecting authoritarians, generals, kings, and dictators. Its members went after Qaddafi not because he offended their ideas about governance, but because they didn’t like or trust him; in the past, Qaddafi had organized assassination plots against some of his dictator brethren.

In the case of Syria, the League’s mainly Sunni Muslim-led members are motivated largely by their fear of Iran, which is mostly Shiite. Iran uses its alliance with Assad’s regime to maintain a land bridge to its radical ally Hezbollah, in Lebanon. If Assad falls, Iran will be weakened, a goal that is particularly compelling for the Gulf monarchies, which live in Iran’s shadow across the Persian Gulf and worry about its export of Shia revolution to their own soil. Also, the League’s members, like Western governments, do not want an unmanaged Syrian collapse to cause a regional war—a war that Iran might exploit at the expense of the Gulf monarchies.

To rally global support for action against Assad, at least some of the League’s illiberal members have at times adapted the terminology of the global human-rights movement. Prince Saud al-Faisal, a Princeton alumnus, is the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, a kingdom that also invokes a divine right to rule, and whose security forces this winter have periodically shot small numbers of protesters to death, according to fragmented and muted press reports. (Saudi Arabia lacks an independent media.) Recently, however, Faisal criticized Assad, declaring that the actions of Syria’s security forces amounted to “a mass purge without any humanitarian considerations.”

In this discourse, the ideas, words, and concepts of Western humanitarian law have gradually blended with Islamic, anti-colonial, and nationalist language. During the nineteen-nineties, Muslim Brotherhood members and other Islamist dissenters imprisoned by secular dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria rallied global allies and fought for local legitimacy by adapting the methods and ideas of secular human-rights activists in the former Soviet Union. Last year, while travelling in Tunisia, I met Moncef Marzouki, a dissident who had been forced into exile in France, and who described eloquently how Western and Arab human-rights ideas melded. Marzouki is now the president of Tunisia.

In 1994, the League adopted the Arab Charter on Human Rights, a document that sought to “prepare future generations in the Arab States to live free and responsible lives in a civil society.” The document also endorsed “the principle that all human rights are universal, indivisible, and indissoluble.” Yet the Charter repugnantly described Zionism as a form of racism and subjugated the rights of women to Islamic law, however that might be interpreted. The Charter’s idealism remains half-baked today.

In Libya, however, it was the League’s willingness to act that made effective international humanitarian intervention possible. The resulting war was costly and unruly, and it is impossible to predict what sort of government Libyans will endure in its aftermath. Yet the intervention over-all was just and justified, and rooted in international law.

Syria offers no similar pathway to protect civilians from Assad’s heinous crimes. Realistically, any territorial intervention must be led and carried out by regional governments, not by Europe or the United States.

On February 24th, Tunisia will host an international meeting to consider what might be done, given that Russia and China have blocked action at the U.N. The most promising ideas require leadership by Turkey, a neighbor of Syria that has been forced to house tens of thousands of refugees along its border. There are proposals under discussion to establish a humanitarian corridor from Turkey into Syria, perhaps similar to the protected area that was established in Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, after the 1990-1991 Gulf War against Saddam Hussein. This is a credible proposal, if the governments that construct such a zone possess the political will and the military means to protect its inhabitants, over a sustained period, from Syria’s inevitable tank incursions and artillery bombardments.

No intervention of this type is ever clean or free of residual, harmful effects. If Syria’s war crimes were not so abhorrent, the cost-benefit equation might argue for indirect aid to Assad’s victims. Turkey’s position is hardly unblemished: it has regional ambitions of its own; its government previously coddled Assad; and its democratically elected Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has taken actions that smack of authoritarianism against domestic critics.