Like... the prophecy Rand and Moiraine bicker about in the beginning of tSR is a good example.

It's some passage about binding the spears to him, and reminding them of a dream, and a forsaken city.

So, a few things.

1. Prophecies can reference anything. ANYTHING. That prophecy makes perfect sense in retrospect, but Moiraine's interpretation (send the Tairen armies to fight the Forsaken's city in Illian, reminding the world of the dream of salvation of the Dragon Reborn) was totally valid and reasonable.

2. As far as I can tell, the Karetheon Cycle is huge. Add to the fact that
a)There's no narrative flow- it's just isolated stanzas that jump back and forth in time,
b)Since there's no chronology, you have simultaneously consider every single prophecy at any given time to see if it applies. This is even more difficult because
c)They're all translations, from during the Breaking, which goes hand in hand with the fact that
d)Not that many people have studied the whole thing. There aren't many scholars and philosophers in the world, and for the last three thousand years all of their studies have been mostly conjecture in any case.


So, you have a giant, obscure piece of prophecy that hasn't really been studied much, and is almost impossible to apply to whatever the current situation is.



We, the readers, have a few big advantages.
a)We have a limited chronology-no prophecy is fulfilled before it's printed in a book, for us.
b)We have a narrower scope- we only have to worry about the prophecies that we read.
c)We have a near-omniscient view. We don't know everything that's going on in the world, but we know most. We know what Rand's doing, and planning, and that Mat is marrying the Daughter of the Nine Moons, and Moridin's chessboard-thing, and allthe rest. Harid Fel, as smart as he was, didn't have nearly as much to work with.