How will Syrias election result impact on US positions?
SHAFAQNA | by Leila Yazdani: Bashar Al-Assad has won another seven-year term with 95% of the votes  an increase on the 89% he won in 2014. Wednesdays presidential vote is the second since the beginning of Syrias war a decade ago, a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and forced millions to leave the country. This election was the second in the shadow of the Syrian war under the terms of a new constitution introduced in 2012 that allowed rival candidates to compete for the first time since the 1960s, Washington Post told. The win delivers Assad, 55, seven more years in power and lengthens his familys rule to nearly six decades. His father, Hafez Al-Assad, led Syria for 30 years until his death in 2000. Syrian people hope the vote will open the door to international aid and reconstruction funding, particularly from those Arab countries that severed relations after the 2011 uprising. The people inside Syria right now believe that the best solution for them is the current president, a Syrian businessman in Damascus tells NPR. Even so, the situation is slowly but steadily normalizing in Syria. Some refugees are returning to their homeland, and certain parts of the country have already been rebuilt. But, a lot of progress remains. Assads re-election is a reiteration of the great foreign-policy lesson for US  For the United States, Assads re-election in Syria, where the last three US presidents have launched strikes, should be a reiteration of the great foreign-policy lesson of the post-9/11 era: US government cannot remake the world in its image. Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities, contributing editor at The Week wrote that US cannot play global police and social worker rolled into one, launching one military intervention after another to solve every problem and topple every regime. Washingtons regime change projects over the past 20 years have failed. New reporting from Bonnie Kristian in Business Insider, concludes that they failed even when they succeeded, as in Iraq and Libya. And they failed when they failed, as in Syria, where Assad continues to hold on to power. Robert Ford, who was US ambassador to Syria when the civil war began in 2011, told The Washington Post ahead of the vote: Great powers like the United States cannot remove this guy. US supports obviously anti-democratic forces and sanctions  US and European countries directly supported armed militants against the Syrian government, including those espousing radical ideologies. These terrorists were euphemistically described as moderate rebels, though evidence eventually emerged of them carrying out unquestionably terrorist actions, news.cgtn mentioned. The public explanation for this atrocious support of obviously anti-democratic forces was that they were supposedly more democratic than the Damascus government. That was never the case, yet the Western media narrative still refuses to acknowledge that. In addition, the USs unilateral sanctions regime has acted as a powerful deterrent to international investors interest in helping to reconstruct this war-torn nation, and the massive effort of rebuilding the countrys destroyed infrastructure. Now, the Syrian presidential elections show that foreign-backed terrorist-led hybrid wars dont always succeed. The consequences of this failed one are enormous since over half a million people were killed and many millions forced to flee from their homeland.