It is Saturday night and we could be accused of digging up old posts instead of coming up with new material. But this photo (from 2010!) stands as refutation of the idea that the Sunni Gulf Arabs have always had some intrinsic vendetta against the Alawite Bashar al-Assad. That's President Assad and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia sitting next to each other at the Nobles' Palace restaurant when the King visited Damascus just 3 years ago.
Then Assad let things get to the point where he's gassing Damascus suburbs. Tough to blame an outside sectarian agenda for that one.
UPDATE: This Wall Street Journal article (subs. maybe req'd) notes that King Abdullah exerted some effort to win over Bashar al-Assad from his Iran comfort zone before concluding that al-Assad wasn't for turning.