Washington, we all know, is the land of the experts– those who, with great confidence, tell us what is going to happen. Those proven right will remind us of it and perhaps try to sell us a newsletter, while those proven wrong remain silent and hope we’ll all forget. Mostly, perhaps, we do forget.
But now the authors of a new book called The Experts Speak have gone back through the records and with vicious pleasure have recorded some experts’ predictions from the past.
:::flip:::
Lord Kelvin, the great British physicist in the nineteenth century: “Radio has no future.”
The New York Times correspondent in Moscow in 1920: “The Bolshevik government will not last six months.”
Abraham Lincoln in 1860: “The South has too much sense and too good temper to break up the nation.”
The head of the U.S. Patent Office in 1899: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”
Jimmy Carter, in 1977: “Because of the greatness of the Shah, Iran is an island of stability in the Middle East.”
And my favorite, John B. Sedgewick, a Union Army general in the Civil War, seeing the Confederate Army open fire on his troops at the Battle of Spotsylvania, said he was not worried because “they could not hit an elephant at this dist…”
To which I add, Colin Powell: “There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction. If biological weapons seem too terrible to contemplate, chemical weapons are equally chilling.” Address to the U.N. Security Council
2/5/2003
