This wasn’t hard to see coming:

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According to secular Syrian rebels interviewed in Istanbul, even though the insurgency to topple the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is increasing in size and sophistication, Gulf Arab states—chiefly Saudi Arabia—are empowering Islamists at the expense of majoritarian secularists. Rebels from the Idlib and Hama provinces fear that religious extremists will be harder to control or contain in a post-Assad state, a consequence they see as leading directly from continued American myopia and inaction on Syria.

There is no chance the Arab world—and especially not the Saudis—would just sit back and watch as a totalitarian Alawite state slaughters Sunni Arabs by the thousands. And there was also never a chance that the Saudis would empower liberal, moderate, and secular Sunnis by giving them guns.

The longer this goes on as a straight-up sectarian war between Sunnis and Alawites, the worse the final outcome is going to be.