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Intelligence is like opsec: you only have to be wrong once and the enemy only has to be right once. You can get everything right but overlook a key detail. A case could be made that 911 and the Iraq War were failures: in the former missing the threat of Bin Laden (an NBA player, of all people, warned of the threat of Bin Laden in 1996) or failing to stop the hijackers, and regarding Iraq, a garbage-in-garbage-out problem.
Given that they got Iraq and 911 wrong, this does not prove competence, rather that they are hit and miss.
Of course, as you point out, successful intelligence by definition being covert does not leave any footprint, whereas intelligence failures are public owing to the consequences of said failure.
Having a perfect record on stopping terrorism is not realistic, though in the years since 9/11 the track record is a lot better than most people would have predicted.
While the IC is not blameless for the invasion of Iraq, the vast majority of the blame is on the Bush admin for cherry picking and massaging reporting to support their preconceived notions soon after the intelligence failures of 9/11. Nobody had definitive evidence Saddam didn’t have a WMD program and the general prior was that he did have something because he sure did have one previously.
In contrast, the US demonstrating publicly it had evidence of the Russian invasion and insight into Putin’s inner circle is a basically unprecedented move because of the risk it posed to sources and methods.
It’s funny you say this when upthread someone makes the point that the IC can cover up its failures. The reality is that either can be the case, though on average I think successes are less likely to be disclosed in near-real time.
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