"Catastrophic success"
I heard that on the NBC Nightly news -- attibuted to that paragon of rhetorical delivery, our current President -- just a few minutes ago, and guffawed. Sounded to me like Bush has hired geoff "half" baikie for the speech-writing team. So I Googled it, just to make sure the quote was accurate . . . It is, but it looks in this article that the phrase was coined by Condi:
But Bush declined to take up that argument, or talk about whether it was a mistake to pursue de-Baathification of the government so vigorously that many government officials were alienated and joined the resistance to the occupation. Speaking after the interview, which she sat in on, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said that Bush had been briefed before the war on a number of contingencies, including what she termed "catastrophic success," the collapse of Saddam's government, but that was only one of a number of possibilities the White House considered.(emphasis mine)
Source: Marin (CA) Independent Journal reprinted from the NYT.
