"Catastrophic Success"

Much has been made this week of Bush's use of the term "catastrophic success" -- an alert reader wondered if he'd misspoke, but then did a google search and found that Rumsfeld had also used the term. Yes, it's a nice, Rumsfeldian image -- the idea that our forces were just so successful at routing the Iraqi forces that disaster was inevitable.

Right.

Here's what Our Leader says in Time:

Had we had to do it over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success -- being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day. I couldn't have sat down and said to you, By the way, we're going to be so victorious so quickly that we'll end up having to fight another third of the Baathists over the next year in order to bring liberty to the country. There's an idea that you can chew on.

Yes, you can chew on that -- as, apparently, the Time reporters did -- or you can ask a follow-up question, such as, "But Mr. President, didn't your very own State Dept. foresee many of 'the consequences of catastrophic success'? I mean, they published an extensive, multi-volume report predicting much of the chaos that followed the fall of Baghdad. Why didn't your administration take their work seriously instead of allowing Rumsfeld to disregard it as well as disregarding Gen. Shinsekeli's estimate for troop requirements, an estimate, by the way, based on hard-fought experience in the Balkans?"

To echo Brad DeLong, why oh why can't we have a better press corps?