Call it a diplomatic ass chewing, and I'm sure that on 911 The President asked the very same question of his advisers, starting with Dick Cheney and working his way down.
Are you prepared to call him a failure for that as well?
The facts of the 9/11 terrorists were not in front of Bush or Cheney or Rummy nor available to be in front of them.
The facts of the depth of disenchament and corruption of the PLO, the PA, Arafat and his sucessors and the facts of Hamas and their repsective history and the conditions on the ground, relative to the strenght of Hamas, was known, was available and was ignored. Condi was last in a State Department bubble. Had she still be in academia, out from under the cloud at the State Department, where she would do her own critical thinking, she would probably have been one who tried to warn her peers about a likely Hamas victory.
I do not see Rummy as lost in the cloud at DOD, in fact, from what I am told, he is not loved very much by the civilian bureacracy at DOD - because he lets them know he is in charge, not them.