I remember a book I was given at my previous job called The Logic of Failure. It's a fascinating book to me because it points out that for most of us, our intuition can lead us to failure. I was looking for a link to it and found this summary. It's been a long time since I read the book, and something in this summary jumped out at me.
▪ People fail to formulate goals in concrete terms. ▪ People fail to recognize when goals contradict one another. ▪ People fail to set clear priorities. ▪ People fail to handle temporal developments adequately. ▪ People fail to correct (and sometimes even recognize) their errors.
Isn't that exactly what happened in Iraq?