Obama’s Former Defense Secretary Confirmed A Suspicion About The White House’s Approach To Syria

Two years after the war in Syria had broken out, the Obama administration had still not formulated a coherent policy response to the crisis that has now claimed more than 200,000 lives.

That is according to Obama's former secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel.

In a blistering interview with Foreign Policy, Hagel described how the administration effectively kicked the can down the road when it came to crafting a decisive strategy to end the war.

“For one thing, there were way too many meetings. The meetings were not productive,” Hagel, who served from 2013 to 2015, told Foreign Policy on Thursday.

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“Hagel's interview reaffirms what we already knew about the Obama administration's policy in Syria,” Tony Badran, a Middle East expert and researcher at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, told Business Insider on Friday.

“The US' Syria policy has always been in the head of one man, and one man only: Barack Obama. No one else has ever really had a say in what happens in Syria,” Badran continued.

“Obama has owned it since day one — and from day one, he never intended to remove Assad.”

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