Jeffrey Goldberg, Columnist

White House Now Seeks Bush-Era Endorsements on Syria

For the first time in the unfolding Syria crisis (okay, maybe for the third time), I feel as if weâve definitively slipped down the rabbit hole.

September 7, 2013 at 2:58 PM UTC

By Jeffrey Goldberg

Jeffrey Goldberg is a columnist for Bloomberg View writing about the Middle East, U.S. foreign policy and national affairs. He is a national correspondent for the Atlantic, the author of "Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror" and a winner of the National Magazine Award for reporting. He has also covered the Middle East as a staff writer for the New Yorker. Goldberg began his career at the Washington Post. He later wrote a column for the Jerusalem Post, covered the Mafia for New York magazine, and wrote for several years for the New York Times Magazine. He has been a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a fellow of the Jerusalem Foundation. He was born in New York, and now lives in Washington with his wife and three children.

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For the first time in the unfolding Syria crisis (okay, maybe for the third time), I feel as if we've definitively slipped down the rabbit hole. Last night, Susan Rice, President Barack Obama's national security adviser, tweeted the following: "Former NSA Steve Hadley: 'I believe the only way we're going to get a good outcome is if the President uses military force in Syria.' "

This statement might be true, or it might not. I don't know, which is one of the reasons that ambivalence is the appropriate response to the president's request to Congress. But the issue is not the statement -- the issue is the person who made the statement. A reminder: Steve Hadley was George W. Bush's national security adviser. The Obama administration, which came into power in good part because of the national security missteps of the Bush administration, is now citing a former Bush official -- an official deeply involved in analyzing and packaging what turned out to be inaccurate intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities -- to buttress its case for intervention in Syria.