… instead of starting a war based on a couple of contacts?
Well, of course. In retrospect, that’s easy.
So my real question is :
Should they do that now? Run out and hire and train a billion dollar’s worth of Arabic and Farsi and Urdu speaking spies to save the world from the next trillion dollar war.
No amount of intelligence is going to prevent someone who wants (and has the means) to go to war from doing it. Bush was presented with intelligence that contradicted the reasons he listed for going to war with Iraq, and proceded anyway while his administration attempted to blackmail, extort, and coerce those who had information that contradicted his reasoning to keep it under wraps. People have actually been convicted and sentenced for this.
Better intelligence won’t stop future wars. Where it might be a much bigger help is in preventing terrorist attacks. I would like to see a much bigger part of the defense budget go toward the intelligence agencies than what we have now, and a much smaller part of the defense budget go toward troop levels and weapons research/development. We’re not at risk of a country invading us, even by the wildest stretch of the imagination. The risk to us is small groups of people without strong government ties (or with strong ties, but operating independently of any government) plotting and committing low-tech attacks on civilians. You can’t stop those kind of attacks with a trillion-jillion long range bombers.
The US had almost no Arabic speaking or reading agents. Mid east intelligence as the WMD fiasco proves was sorely lacking. Its not a quantity or budget problem. They have lots of money but are run by neanderthals.
The problem was more that there was a think-tank group whose opinions were given more weight than that of the rest of the intelligence community. This think-tank group operated generally to attempt to find a reason for war, rather than to evaluate if a war should happen.