[The Sixth Wizard]

I think I'll go back a bit here...

But the Sauron that we read from the chapters of Akallabeth, the Rings of Power and Lord of The Rings was far from a slave creature of the senses and unbridled chaos. He was immensely cunning, devious, patience, thoughful and above all never lost sight of his ultimate aim. He was as I would submit, a master strategist of the art of maneuver

You speak of Sauron the Deciever as he is in Numenor. But Tolkien speaks at the start of the Silmarillion about the three stages of evil, rise, fall and the machine.

In terms of Morgoth, the rise is the will to make the world a place for him to govern, at first with good intentions, but nevertheless to make how he wants it. Th fall of Morgoth is when he descends into evil by decieving the Valar to have the world to himself. His Machine is where he is so obsessed with killing or corrupting the Children of Iluvatar, he expends his spirit in the twisting of good and the domination of Arda, and destroys himself from within.

In terms of Sauron, the rise (this is after he repents of his evil deeds at Angband) is when he helps to create the first Rings, and gains the friendship of the Elves. Then he creates the One Ring, and his Fall involves trying to decieve the elves and the Numenoreans. I see it that the Fall stage is still deceptive, not quite complete evil. By the time he returns to Mordor he has entered the Machine stage, openly declaring war, like Saruman openly declares war upon Rohan. So once evil has entered the Machine stage, it weakens the deception and this leads to their downfall (Saruman can no longer decieve Gandalf because of his open war).

So Sauron is no longer such a mean, lying character as he is in Akkalabeth because he is the Dark Lord. He has surrendered somewhat to the blind madness of evil, and so he is decieved at the Black Gate in his rush to destroy Aragorn, and doesn't heed the trap. Gandalf says that Sauron would never expect the Ring to go to Mordor, because he cannot percieve that Aragorn would not take the Ring for himself. Thus evil will always destroy itself by the very nature of evil.

Cool eh? And of course Gandalf would never lie, that is the beginning of the Fall!

By the way Saruman would never get away with trafficking Easterlings over from the East, way too difficult. Just use wolves to pillage everything between Isengard and the Shire instead, I'd think.