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There’s a question mark,” Ambassador Soemadi Brotodiningrat told me a few days ago. “There’s a big question mark as to whether the silent majority in Syria is really against Bashar al-Assad.”

Now a senior adviser at the Defense Ministry, Soemadi explained why Syria would not become Libya II. The situation in Libya last year, he said, was clear: Most Libyans hated Muammar el-Qaddafi. He had to hire foreign mercenaries to do the fighting for him. The Libyan opposition was strong and it controlled large areas like Benghazi.

In Syria, the government clearly has the upper hand.

Soemadi was speaking from the personal experience of a veteran diplomat. But the statistics support him. Although the Assad regime is indeed brutal, educated estimates say that only 40 percent of the Syrian population is against it.

The reason for this is that there are several large minority groups that do not trust the majority Sunni Muslims who make up most of the opposition. Foremost is the Alawite minority to which Assad belongs. There are the other Shiite offshoots: the Druze, the Ismailis. There are also the Christians and some pro-government Sunnis.

Why can’t they trust a post-Assad Sunni regime? Well, look at what happened in Libya. A minority group, the Amazigh, better known as Berbers, fought fiercely on the side of the National Transitional Council against Qaddafi. Today there are reports that they face bleak prospects because the new regime is adopting Qaddafi’s policy of marginalizing them.

Syria will not be Libya II for a number of other reasons. The Libyan opposition had an air force, courtesy of NATO. The Syrian rebels will not enjoy that kind of air support. Libya has oil, Syria none. Remove one NATO incentive.

Libya is mostly coastal plain and desert where convoys are sitting ducks. In mountainous Syria, they would not be easy targets. Syria has nine times more tanks than Libya ever had, and three times more artillery. And if 60 percent of the population is still pro-Assad, then you have to reckon with a force 13.5 million strong, about twice the number of all Libyans put together.

Libya dismantled its missile program early in the past decade. Syria has maintained its missile program with the help of Russia, North Korea and Iran.

And there is the not-so-small matter of legitimacy. You can’t have the NATO do in Syria what it did in Libya — you can’t even stop the Assad regime from killing another protester — without getting a piece of paper from the UN Security Council certifying that the undertaking is based on the “responsibility to protect” people being exterminated by their own government.

That is precisely what the League of Arab States failed to get from the Council last week. During the Syrian government’s brutal crackdown of pro-democracy demonstrators, some 5,000 people have lost their lives. That moved the 13-member Security Council to vote on a resolution that would call for a stop to the violence, possibly creating a Syrian-led political process that would lead to democratic transition, and oblige the Syrian authorities to cooperate with the Arab League, the Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights and the Human Rights Council. All 13 votes were trumped by the Russian and Chinese vetoes.

Russia argued that the resolution did not sufficiently demand that opposition groups stop attacking the Syrian government. China cited what happened in Libya when it did not exercise its veto: NATO went beyond its mandate.

Now there’s talk about “a solution outside of a UN framework.” That could mean some kind of a “coalition of the willing” giving support — overt or covert — to the Syrian opposition. And it could lead to a long and bloody civil war in which thousands more will die before Assad is gone.

It’s a crazy formula: To end the killings, you must kill the killers. Meanwhile, the killers kill to stay alive.

That does not make sense. What makes sense to Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa is for finding a way to stop the violence. He has recently called for the resumption of the political process in the embattled country “so that the Syrian people’s aspirations could be realized.”

He has been talking on the phone with his Turkish counterpart, and it looks like these two countries with large Muslim populations will team up to host an international conference on Syria. The idea is to formulate a workable international consensus on how to end the violence in Syria.

Wish them Godspeed. Thousands of lives are at stake.

Jamil Maidan Flores is a poet, fiction writer, playwright and essayist who has worked as a speechwriter for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1992.