Are you actually arguing that any vote should be counted as for Assad?

Wrong. Your ilk is the one portraying Assad as the reincarnation of evil while in fact attempting to destroy the Syrian state as a whole.

Any vote is a vote for the system, not for Assad. Millions of Syrians voted for the System which happens to have Assad at the top.

It may surprise you, but a war is actual protracted hostilities taking place.

Warm or cold, confrontations never ended.

it was a pretty chill place

Absolutely. And look at what shitholes foreign funded insurgents turned areas under their control into. Damascus and the coast are still pretty chill.

All under the watchful eye of mukhabarat, of course.

You are always under "watchful eyes" whether the NSA or Mukhaberat. Syria is no different. If anything Syria has a legitimate reason: A belligerent neighbor is foaming at the mouth for seizing more Syrian territory and generally making Syrians disappear.

What do you consider a "native" system? Where one gets to rule for as long as he desires, and no one else gets to vote?

A Syrian system that came into power after overthrowing a colonial system is native in my eyes. Insurgents armed by foreigners are not.

Whoever you are, you're not in a position to make definitive statements like that.

Why not? The evidence is out there. You choose not to look.

Sure, there's a lot of money flowing to both sides of the conflict.

Except one side is the Syrian Government fully entitled to ask for help from other sovereign governments, and the other side is a bunch of foreign funded gangs. There is no equivalence.

The fact is, an uprising of that scale would have never taken place without a sizeable local population support. In percentages, how much, we'll never know.

I never said the Syrian Arab Republic was perfect. No doubt some would have had legitimate grievances. That's why reforms were implemented and regular elections became the norm.

The violence though was perpetuated by foreign entities arming and funding insurgents.