Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> loupaulsen at attbi.com wrote:
>
> >Doug, remember last week or so Powell was saying that it was pretty certain
> >they would get the war resolution through the Security Council, and you
> >asked "would Powell say that if it wasn't true?"
>
> Yeah, I remember, and I'm glad it's looking like he was wrong. But
> they must have known this at the time, so I still don't understand
> why he'd say something with confidence that wouldn't work out a week
> later. Was it part of the sales effort, or are they thoroughly
> self-deluded?
I think all leading bureaucrats (state and corporate, and probably NGOs) are _always_, to some extent, self-deluded. This explains (for example) the occasionally _really_disastrous failure of safety in mines, automobile design, space flights, etc., or Enron type collapses(thinking they will somehow find a way out of the hole they are digging), lunatic military decisions (the battles of the Somme and of Verdun), etc. Bureaucracies have to operate by predicting the future -- and a large proportion of such predictions are always wrong, some disastrously so.
That's why my favorite quotation is not from Marx or Lenin but from John Adams (quoted by Pound): Never trust the english government to act in its own interests.
Carrol
>
> Doug