THE comparison with Libya is irresistible. Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and Syria's President Bashar Assad are both odious dictators. The colonel is a lot crazier, has been in charge a lot longer, has killed a lot more people over the years, and has drawn up a far longer list of enemies at home and abroad. But Mr Assad, who has run Syria since his long-ruling father, Hafez, died in 2000, inherited a regime that has been just as nasty.

Assad père notoriously butchered perhaps as many as 20,000 people in the city of Hama in 1982. The son is surrounded by the same clique of greedy gangsters, many of them his close relations, who have routinely used assassination, imprisonment and torture as instruments of rule. And since Syria's protesters have started to express their democratic yearning, Mr Assad has been matching Colonel Qaddafi's brutality. Human-rights groups reckon his security forces have killed at least 1,300 Syrians, most of them civilians. The tempo of repression is quickening (see article). Moreover, the unrest and the violence seem to be spreading; the opposition says that on Friday June 10th demonstrators rose up in no fewer than 138 places.

The NATO campaign against Colonel Qaddafi has saved many lives in Libya—even though he clings on to power. Seeing that outsiders have intervened to stop the butchery and, by extension, to remove the tyrant from power in one Arab country, why should they not dish out the same salutary treatment to Syria and Mr Assad?

The simple answer is that Syria is—and always was—too big and complicated for outsiders to step in. Liberal intervention is not about charging blindly in, but about using force judiciously when possible. Whereas Libya, though vast in desert area, is a country of 6m-plus fairly homogeneous people living on a narrow coastal strip, Syria is a web of religions and sects embracing 21m people scattered across an area that abuts the Middle East's most combustible flashpoints, including Israel, Lebanon and Iraq.

The intensification of sectarian strife that might well accompany a military intervention in Syria could light a fuse in neighbouring Lebanon, where tensions in an even more complex sectarian labyrinth keep the country smouldering at the best of times. Iraq has long suffered from the infiltration of jihadists from Syria, who might be emboldened if the Assad regime were to fall. As for Israel, Syria is still technically at war with it, though the Assads have been canny enough, on the whole, not to tempt it into using its full military might against them. But instability in Damascus is already causing ructions on the Israeli-Syrian border. Finally, there is Turkey, which for many years got on badly with Syria, but which more recently managed a rapprochement. However, in the past fortnight, since thousands of terrified Syrians have fled across the border into Turkey, relations have sharply worsened. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's recently re-elected prime minister, has turned against Mr Assad. There has even been talk of Turkey creating a haven for those refugees, which would inevitably become a source of tension and even violence. In sum, Syria is a regional snake-pit in which few neighbours—or outsiders from farther afield—would be wise to dangle their toes.

Keep it local

But Mr Assad must not get away with murder. Nor should he bank for ever on his old friends in Russia (with China standing by) to fend off condemnation in the UN Security Council. Sanctions against leading Syrians and firms linked to them may hurt a bit—and should be widened. But the best-placed people to make Mr Assad give ground are local—the Turks, the Gulf Co-operation Council with Saudi Arabia and Qatar to the fore, and the usually toothless but perhaps slowly stirring Arab League, which endorsed NATO's intervention in Libya.

If he were sensible, Mr Assad would, under such neighbours' pressure, agree to open talks with the gamut of liberals and socialists, secular-minded Syrians and Islamists, including the banned Muslim Brothers and the signatories of the admirable Damascus declaration, which united opposition calls for reform in 2005. As a precondition, all political parties and the media would be set free, and open elections promised within, say, a year. As things stand, Mr Assad will surely reject all such ideas out of hand. But the tide may be turning. If he refuses to budge, the Syrian people will bring him down in the end—on their own, and bloodily.