McClatchy quotes Rafik Hariri Center Resident Senior Fellow Frederic C. Hof on why the Obama administration still predicts ‘Assad’s days are numbered’:
“There was a default view on the part of some that Assad isn’t even as impressive as some of these other people, so why would he survive if the others went down so rapidly?” recalled Frederic Hof, who led the State Department’s response to the Syrian uprising and is now with the Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council.
Hof agreed that virtually no one in the decision-making circles believed that Assad could ever restore status-quo regime rule, though he said that he and a few others at State warned that “Assad had the resources to stretch this out considerably and we were not seeing forces inside Syria capable of ejecting him anytime soon.”