The New Yorker quotes Rafik Hariri Center Resident Senior Fellow Frederic C. Hof on the difficulties of implementing US policy solutions to solve the crisis in Syria:
“In Syria specifically, there’s no convergence on who the enemy is,” Fred Hof, a former State Department Syria specialist in the Obama Administration, told me. “There’s a general tendency to come up with ideas that may sound good in an inter-agency meeting, that check every box, and that scratch everybody’s itch, but then have no bearing to what’s going on on the ground.” Hof left the government out of frustration in 2012 and is now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “As a rule, you can’t create a foreign army to carry out your own mission,” he said.