[Kuruharan]

Please provide evidence as to wether these supposed other lesser rings where.

What? Could you restate that in a less garbled fashion?

In that particular instance he was incompetent.

He was mistaken. It is not the same thing as incompetence. A mistake is simply an error. Incompetence categorizes the subject as being wholly unfitted for the required task. You have made a convincing argument that the Wise (and Gandalf in particular) made a mistake (a mistake he owned up to). You have yet to make anything approaching a convincing argument that Gandalf (or anybody else) making a mistake means that they are incompetent.

IMO Gandalf deceived himself by saying, well if Saruman who studied the lore of the Rings think that it is lost then it must be so.

Perhaps. However, defering to another’s judgement is not proof of incompetence. Nobody had reason to suspect that Saruman was a traitor at this point. Interestingly enough, at the time of the last meeting of the White Council (according to the Tale of Years) Saruman had not even then made his final descent into evil. There was no reason to suppose that Saruman was not telling the truth as far as he knew it.

A note about fires, you don't mean the same fire in Bilbo's fireplace that could not even melt gold?

You are being deliberately obtuse. Gandalf did not know that the letters (or whatever) would be there to be seen. He investigated that possibility as soon as he considered a means of doing so.

The good guys only won by sheer luck. The destruction of the ring was the only way in which they could win.

Yet again you have missed the point of what I was trying to say.

How does their victory by luck prove they were incompetent? I could name many instances where highly competent individuals succeeded by luck (or at least what is called luck). That is just a part of life.

If they could have destroyed the Ring much sooner than when it actually happened, a great deal of wars and battles and suffering could have been avoided. The destruction of Sauron in the year 2 of the TA would have been a greater victory for ME than his actual defeat 3000 plus years later.

While this may be true, this does not have much to do with what we are talking about. That should be discussed under a thread titled “Why didn’t the Elves Push Isildur into Mount Doom when they had the Chance?” While I personally think that they should have dumped Isildur into the volcano and been done with it; that they did not is not proof of incompetence. The usual defense is more of a moral argument.