Fixing what's broken
Let's not forget our history. We underestimated the Soviet nuclear program in 1949, China's in 1964, India's in 1974, and Iraq's in 1991. The list goes on: North Korea in 1994, Iraq again in 1995, India in 1998, Pakistan in 1998, North Korea in 2002, and Iran and Libya last year. The point is that without solid evidence to the contrary, it was virtually impossible for the intelligence services to come to conclusions any different from the ones that they did.
But that's not to excuse their mistakes. President Bush's commission must not only find out what went wrong over Iraq but also suggest how our intelligence services might be better organized to prevent future miscalculations. Let's not forget the price we paid for slashing the CIA budget in the mid-1990s, when the agency was allowed to recruit only 25 field agents a year. The CIA, under Tenet, did well after 9/11, when it used additional funds to establish alliances with foreign intelligence services with access to Arabic-speaking field agents.
But recalibrating a globe-spanning intelligence service won't be easy. The CIA must have the resources it needs to protect the nation. Fighting terrorism is too much a question of life and death to be left in the hands of politicians.
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