Two years on ... Wishful thinking is not a policy ONE of President George Bush's best phrases, deployed between the atrocities of September 11th and the American invasion of Afghanistan later that year, was that the effort to win the battle that al-Qaeda's suicide hijackers had launched would consist not of one big victory but rather of �the patient accumulation of successes�. Not everyone, either then or during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq last March, agreed that America's behaviour was truly patient. No matter: it was certainly resolute and pretty relentless, and only the churlish or blinkered could deny that successes were indeed being accumulated. Now, however, on the second anniversary of those terrible events in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, things feel different. �The hapless accumulation of failures� is sounding a more appropriate line. The Economist