President Assad, like all dictators, is fond of talking about sovereignty. "Our guiding light is always Syria's sovereignty," he said in his speech on Monday. 

Sovereignty is indeed at the heart of the Syrian conflict, but not in the way that Assad imagines it. When Assad claims sovereignty what he really means in inviolability: the entitlement of his regime to maintain power through brute force regardless of what anyone else thinks of it.

Not only that. In his speech on Monday he had the gall to portray his regime's struggle for survival as that of "the homeland". Thus, anyone who challenges the regime's inviolability, from outside or within, is violating the homeland of the Syrian people.

Set against that, we have another – more honourable – claim to sovereignty: the right of Syrian citizens to determine their own future and make free choices as to how they shall be governed. In short: sovereignty of the people.

After many years of repression, the Syrian people are finally claiming their sovereignty – and amid all the agonised debate over what to do about Syria we should never lose sight of that. Whatever else happens, the people's sovereignty must be paramount.

It is a natural and human response that people outside Syria who value their own rights should ask what they can do to help – not entirely out of altruism but also out of self-interest, since by supporting the rights of others they are protecting your own.

Of course, it doesn't necessarily follow from this that we can do very much beyond expressing sympathy and solidarity. Any tangible support that we offer has to be within our means. Even if it is sought and we are capable of providing it, we also have to be confident that it will actually help. Help that proves counterproductive is worse than no help at all.

Intervention – a term now often assumed to mean only its most extreme form, military intervention – tends to be thought of as an all-or-nothing choice. In Syria though, as in many other situations, time the question is much more complex: what forms might intervention take, and to what ends?

At the international level, and taking into account all  the obstacles, most of what might usefully be done has already been done. Military intervention is not in prospect: there is little public appetite for it and in any case it would be extremely hazardous. Diplomatically – and economically too, to a large extent – the regime has been isolated. This is plainly having an effect, though the process is one of gradual attrition.

Inside Syria, the regime's resources are increasingly stretched by its efforts to contain the uprising, not to mention an economy that is almost on the rocks. No one can be sure how long the regime will last, though several more months of conflict seem in prospect, at the very least. To outward appearances, the regime still looks fairly solid, though once it seriously starts to crumble the end will probably be swift.

Meanwhile the Annan plan makes no headway. The ceasefire monitors have no ceasefire to monitor. Instead, they have become the official witnesses to atrocities or, far too often, belated witnesses to the aftermath of atrocities. While that was never their intended purpose there is still some value in keeping the monitors in Syria, since they are one of the few authoritative sources of information that can counter the regime's narrative.

All these frustrations have generated a sense of international impotence – hence the talk of needing a Plan B. The question is: would this hypothetical Plan B have any better chance of success than Plan A (the six-point Annan plan)?

There are two principal reasons why the Annan plan is going nowhere. One is that the Assad regime doesn't want to implement it; the other is that the regime's two key supporters – Russia and China – are blocking efforts to make him implement it. 

The Americans' focus now – the emerging Plan B, perhaps – is shifting to what Hillary Clinton described last week as "the essential elements of a democratic transition strategy" for Syria. There have been several recent indications that the US is beginning to favour the "Yemen solution" – essentially a political transition under international management or supervision.

In purely practical terms – apart from the difficulty of persuading President Assad to accept it – the "Yemen solution" is problematic in itself, as I explained here last week. It reeks of neo-imperialism: a weak president installed at the behest of foreign powers, legitimised after a fashion in a one-candidate election and dependent on external support. Apart from that, no one knows whether the Yemen "solution" will actually work.

Talk of an internationally-supervised transition brings us back to the question of sovereignty, and how the Syrian people might achieve it. Keeping up the international pressure on Assad – diplomatically and economically – and calling for a "full transfer of power" is one thing, but going beyond that could easily sabotage the revolution (as it appears to have done in Yemen).

The more international involvement there is in trying to manage a power transfer in Syria, the more likely it is that the goal of popular sovereignty will be lost. That is an even bigger problem in the case of Syria than in Yemen because of the multiple interests at stake – the US, Russia, China, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Sunni, Shia, etc. 

These competing interests have already complicated the Syrian situation and international meddling in a power transfer there would do so even more. For some, the main concern is how "Israel-friendly" a post-Assad government would be. For some, it's relations with Iran and the Sunni-Shia balance, while there are others who hope a negotiated transition would preserve something of the old regime, even if Assad is no longer part of it.

Amid the continuing horrific news from Syria, it is very tempting to say that "we" ought to be doing more. But we shouldn't assume that doing more will necessarily help, and we should try to distinguish between the needs of the Syrian people and the games that states play amongst themselves. Syrians have a right to shape their own future and will do so – if only we let them.

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 10 June 2012.