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You didn't paste the entire text of the original article. In the version on the NYT website, she includes the following passage after "The administration already sounds as triumphalist as Lawrence at his giddiest."

Today's satirical Onion headline reads: "Bush Subconsciously Sizes Up Spain for Invasion."

I think it's telling that Dowd is reduced to actually quoting The Onion (!) in the New York Times. More to the point, since all her (and her colleagues') dire predictions about Bush and this war have been emphatically contradicted by actual events, she now has to chide the administration about things she thinks will occur. It's her version of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em". She can't bring herself to "join 'em", so she is now going with "if you can't beat 'em, criticize something they haven't done yet, and set the bar so high they will never be able to succeed again."

If you check out Tom Friedman's column on the same website, you will see the same phenomenon. It basically says that, while we have won a stunning victory, and liberated Iraq from unbearable misery, there are still some hungry people there -- we better fix that quick or we will have failed.

I suppose there is some satisfaction in having even their grudging, or more accurately, hidden, acknowledgement of our success. It is still frustrating to see the utter hypocrisy in their stances now as compared to when Billy-boy was at the helm.