Obama's former defense secretary confirmed a huge 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.

, 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 2013-2015, told Foreign Policy on Thursday.

"I don't think many times we ever actually got to where we needed to be," Hagel continued, noting that the meetings sometimes went as long as four hours. "We kept kind of deferring the tough decisions. And there were always too many people in the room."

He added: "We seemed to veer away from the big issues. What was our political strategy on Syria?"

Well into the war's fifth year, many are still asking that question - and many suspect there never was a political strategy. Hagel's comments are in line with accounts from other administration officials also present for those marathon meetings on Syria that never seemed to translate into lasting policy decisions.

As The New York Times reported in 2013, Obama seemed uninterested in the subject of Syria "even as the debate about arming the [Syrian] rebels took on a new urgency."

"Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings," The Times reported. "But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum."

'He never intended to remove Assad'

"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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