This statement, "Considering the majority of people say faulty intelligence is to blame for the Iraq war, it's difficult for me to encourage less intelligence surrounding foreign intelligence gathering." is incomplete/incorrect/missing the point/whatever you want to call a polite way of saying "wrong" for a number of reasons, I will state them, in no particular order below.
First, you are confusing data collection and data analysis. It doesn't matter how much and what type of "intelligence" (a misnomer if there ever was one) if you're simply talking about raw data collected from a variety of sources. The data must be parsed and made sense of. In the CIA/NSA/FBI of the 1990's and 2000's, there was a very obvious failure (again, for a number of reasons, some due to simple mistakes, some due to bureaucratic incompetence, some due to political reasons.) to correctly interpret this data. Oops, but hey, it's only a few billion dollars and few tens of thousands of lives.
Second, post-9/11, given the amount of resources spent on intelligence collecting in the Middle East, it's hard to believe that there was anything more that could have been done in terms of signal collections than going full on Big Brother and installing a data collecting device in every person's bunghole in the entire region.
Third, note I said "signal collections," because one of the things people say isn't that it was simply faulty intelligence gathering (or analysis as I discussed above) but also an over reliance on the exact type of data we were gathering, ie, things that float through the ether. We didn't have enough of the old school, human intelligence of the early cold war, that could have helped in making a better determination of whether or not Saddam actually had WMD's (or was building them, whatever). The Human Intelligence they did have, was from special interests that had their own reasons to get rid of Saddam, and there was very little (at least seemingly from the outside) checking on these human sources. So, too few human resources, as well as resources who had their own agendas. That's never going to work out well.
Finally, none of that mattered. The data we had, through the political will of the Administration of the time, was massaged to fit the story, not the other way around. They had a narrative ("Saddam has WMD's"), and then they cherry picked data to support that "conclusion." Only after the fact did the whole "faulty intelligence" story come out, because, you know, it's easier to blame that than saying "yeah, we had a hard on for the guy and we wanted to take him out regardless of what the real story was." But you said it yourself: "It's not like we can take everyone's word for it."
I had a few more points to make, but I'm tired, it's late, I've written enough.
But now Saddam and his WMD's are gone, we have ISIS taking over Iraq, so I guess it all worked out in the end. So the NSA should keep hoovering up all that data, what could go wrong?
First, you are confusing data collection and data analysis. It doesn't matter how much and what type of "intelligence" (a misnomer if there ever was one) if you're simply talking about raw data collected from a variety of sources. The data must be parsed and made sense of. In the CIA/NSA/FBI of the 1990's and 2000's, there was a very obvious failure (again, for a number of reasons, some due to simple mistakes, some due to bureaucratic incompetence, some due to political reasons.) to correctly interpret this data. Oops, but hey, it's only a few billion dollars and few tens of thousands of lives.
Second, post-9/11, given the amount of resources spent on intelligence collecting in the Middle East, it's hard to believe that there was anything more that could have been done in terms of signal collections than going full on Big Brother and installing a data collecting device in every person's bunghole in the entire region.
Third, note I said "signal collections," because one of the things people say isn't that it was simply faulty intelligence gathering (or analysis as I discussed above) but also an over reliance on the exact type of data we were gathering, ie, things that float through the ether. We didn't have enough of the old school, human intelligence of the early cold war, that could have helped in making a better determination of whether or not Saddam actually had WMD's (or was building them, whatever). The Human Intelligence they did have, was from special interests that had their own reasons to get rid of Saddam, and there was very little (at least seemingly from the outside) checking on these human sources. So, too few human resources, as well as resources who had their own agendas. That's never going to work out well.
Finally, none of that mattered. The data we had, through the political will of the Administration of the time, was massaged to fit the story, not the other way around. They had a narrative ("Saddam has WMD's"), and then they cherry picked data to support that "conclusion." Only after the fact did the whole "faulty intelligence" story come out, because, you know, it's easier to blame that than saying "yeah, we had a hard on for the guy and we wanted to take him out regardless of what the real story was." But you said it yourself: "It's not like we can take everyone's word for it."
I had a few more points to make, but I'm tired, it's late, I've written enough.
But now Saddam and his WMD's are gone, we have ISIS taking over Iraq, so I guess it all worked out in the end. So the NSA should keep hoovering up all that data, what could go wrong?