This is astounding. A first post that actually addresses the subject and does it well. Kudos.
I just have one addition to the analysis, a stock market pricing model cheats the artists. Raising the price reduces the sales and limits the artist's influence in the culture. Artists who make 10x more off 1/10th of the sales lose out on their ancillary revenues such as concert tickets (they can't fill as large venues) and clothing even though their music income stays absolutely the same.
I think it quite likely that Windows CALs are being included as Windows Server sales. They are nothing of the sort. They are a license for client access, not software per se. You'd likely get very different revenue numbers if the server software was broken out from the CALs.
During the Tsunami crisis, the UN got caught repeatedly claiming credit for US national assistance. They weren't out in the field helping, just asking for money and doing really snazzy press conferences. The complaint isn't that poor people are being fed, but rather that they aren't while the UN claims credit for other's work.
Then there's the pedophila, food for sex scandals, the oil for palaces scandals, the whoring of Security Council votes, the list goes on and on. There's a lot not to like about the present, real world UN system, even in traditional areas of UN strength and competence.
The League of Nations came. The League of Nations went. We did better next round. The UN came. The UN can very well go when it's no longer useful. We *can* do better in future.
The tricky part is in extracting the ITU and other useful bits who have entered the UN system as a logistical convenience. It is possible to do.
The biggest bugaboo in France up until the riots is about how the "polish plumbers" are going to take all the craft jobs away. With a French passport you can travel most anywhere. There's no reason why French passport holders who feel discriminated against in France can't come to the US. They aren't doing it though.
You are right about France sweeping things under the rug while the US talks about them. The capitalist system tends to force you to deal with things earlier while socialist systems enable a government to hide things for longer. The problems just fester, though and you end up worse off.
I think that it would be more productive to say that the system needs a negative feedback loop to rein it in when it goes too far. Whether that feedback loop can be found on the political left or elsewhere is an open question in my mind.
Capitalism has, as an advantage, the feature that it is an incomplete system. It's somewhat like a Unix utility. It does one thing (wealth creation and efficient allocation) really well and formally doesn't have anything to say about politics, social structures and habits, etc. You can have a capitalist system and vary in your political habits, much as the US and UK differ in their political arrangements but both are capitalist nations and get along with each other pretty well.
I perfectly understand the temptations of the buy, buy, buy consumer culture and how empty it leaves you spiritually. I have developed the ability to just stand up and chuck my TV in the basement when I think that my family has started wasting too much time at the tube (we did it for a few weeks last month because my 6 year old was getting too immersed in certain cartoons). This is very unusual behavior for a US middle class mid-west family. I actually lost the chance to be a Nielsen family because we didn't own a TV at the time.
My personal answer is being serious about my Eastern Catholic faith. YMMV.
Please provide a link or a cite to an approved human therapy for ESCs involving heart regeneration. Here's one for ASCs
B.E. Strauer et al., "Myocardial regeneration after intracoronary transplantation of human autologous stem cells following acute myocardial infarction," Dtsch Med Wochenschr 126, 932-938; Aug. 24, 2001.
Human autologous stem cells are adult stem cells, ASCs.
If you can't find actual human trials (successful ones that is) or therapies that aren't adult related, maybe you're the one who's promoting propaganda, but it isn't the religious, right-wing kind. If that's the case, maybe you might ask what interests would want to take credit for ASC progress and shine up the reputation of ESC methods?
It's been an allegation published in Nature during 2004, a journal that's usually more credible than "as single person". The controversy sat like a turd in the cloning punch bowl until now when a collaborator with his own considerable reputation decides to cut ties and resign from the project based on new evidence that he's received that Dr. Huang was lying. I tend to believe the US scientist. It's legitimate to say that the evidence hasn't been proven in a court of law but it's hardly an allegation made by a single person.
A huge chunk of the decrease in native american population was accidental disease spread in an era when disease transmission was largely terra incognito. This is not quite the same as piling up skulls in a campaign of genocide against your own people.
The homestead act gave you the land if you could bring in three crops in five years. Whoever taught you that killing natives was part of the bargain really miseducated you. If you paid for that, demand a refund.
People went with 12 hour days 6 days a week because the pay and conditions were improvements over the alternatives. Agriculture was harder work for less money, try 12+ hours seven days a week. As those farmers dried up, conditions would have improved regardless of communism's existence.
Capitalism features a government that acts as an honest referee. Government is pure coercive force and should not be for sale under either system. It's a system failure under both capitalist and communist governance when this happens. The real world use cases tend to be a bit more benign on the capitalism side. That doesn't make it right or a planned feature of the system.
Now men are not angels and systems will fail in the real world sometimes. The key is in honestly comparing how often they fail and what are the consequences as well as how bad are the recovery modes from those failures. In all those, I think that capitalism is much better than its competitors both in theory and real world practice.
People are obsessed with the economy because where the rubber hits the road, it determines whether your baby is going to die or there's going to be enough medicine available to treat the fever/runs/infection that would otherwise kill your child. Proper resource allocation is ultimately about life and death issues.
Government mandated health inspections are not a feature of an ideal capitalist society. They are a government intrusion on the economy (the free market solution is independent, competitive private inspectors). This isn't a commentary on whether government inspection of meat is good or bad, merely that complaining about how government inspection is done badly in the US is not an indictment of the US' capitalist aspects, but rather its socialist ones. Like every modern economy, the US has both systems working in parrallel. It's named a capitalist society in that the capitalist aspects predominate.
He's actually been accused of two things. One is taking eggs unethically. The second is lying about his research methods. The guy dissociating himself from the S. Korean researcher is doing so based on information that came to him on the second charge.
Then it wouldn't be organ donation but eminent domain. Private companies couldn't take it against your estate's will and the government would have to pay the going market rate. Nobody would be without estate if they have viable organs. A full set of organs would be tens of thousands of dollars at least.
I remember when interferon was going to cure cancer. Huge amounts of money got dumped into interferon research. It largely ended up a dry hole. Embryonic stem cell research could end up being a dry hole too. If the adult stem cell guys end up doing it better, cheaper ESC is doomed even if it does work.
So far, the ASC researchers are many years ahead of their ESC competitors. We have actual ASC therapies with many more in human trials. How many ESC therapies are in human trials? The last I heard, the number was zero. By the current state of the science ESC is a loser. So why is the government pouring billions into backing this loser instead of extending the already successful ASC methods further?
Schatten believed Huang's denials. He now has information that makes him doubt those denials. He's figured out that his colleague has been lying to his face for over a year. That's not evidence of being ok with forced egg donations/harvesting.
The research might be important. It certainly looks important at this early stage but if we already knew it was going to work, we wouldn't need to do the research at all, would we. There is a small but real percentage of women who die when they donate their eggs. They apparently got an unusually large number of eggs out of a few donors. All we really know for sure is that Huang lied to the public and his colleagues about at least one aspect of his research. The question then becomes whether this was the only lie.
It's absurd to defend this guy as if he did nothing wrong. He did. The only real question is whether this was an isolated incident or there's other problems with him. At the very least, he needs an ethics minder.
Maybe the fact that he has been lying about where he got the eggs for over a year might lead to a reasonable suspicion that there's something else unethical going on.
Or when did lying in your published research become ethical for a scientist?
People occasionally die from egg donation. It's always a very uncomfortable procedure, no matter what the results. This is why it's important to have true volunteers. All sorts of pressures can be applied to a subordinate in a lab and the overwhelming chances are that the boss will get away with it.
So, they took his master key away, restricted his access to the collections in a manner unique among his colleagues, reassigned him from the supervisor who was supportive of him to one who wasn't, and are just counting down the days to his renewal because they've blackballed him and have made sure that nobody will dare renew his sponsorship. Oh, they also spread vicious rumors about him in order to defame him professionally among his colleagues.
Nah, nothing happened to him at all.
The only reason the Smithsonian isn't in court right now is that the first avenue he went to protest didn't have proper jurisdiction. The SI's going to lose a major court case in a few years over this one.
Generally it's done via a comparative body count. You can't beat the Khmer Rouge in the % sweepstakes. They offed about a third of their population. Now that's revolutionary commitment!
The fundamental purpose of economics is to allocate goods and services efficiently by pricing their value correctly. Communism, of virtually all varieties, swear that they can do this pricing function better than capitalism. They never have. After so many decades, the default communist response to such a request is a quick change of subject or juvenile assertions that economics is not about efficient allocation.
Before the gulags and the death camps come along, there is the fundamental fact that communism can't set a price. All the subsequent violence stems from power mad people who won't make way when, once again, this fact is proven in the real world. There have been communist societies that didn't turn violent, the pre-marxian utopian experiments are a good example. Instead, they all shut themselves down when they figured out after a year or two that it was never going to work.
Only the ignorant and/or evil are communists these days.
As far as capitalism goes, it's funny how the closer to capitalism you get, the better your economic results get (compare economic growth rates and unemployment between France and the US). The closer you get to communism, the worse things become. The US is a capitalist state the same way that the USSR was a communist state. Both states followed their models imperfectly but where the US strays from principles, it performs worse economically, where the USSR strayed from principles (NEP period, for example) it performed much better.
There are a lot of people in Paris who speak poor french, have fewer rights than the 2nd & 3rd generation muslims who are in the streets rioting but these people aren't rioting. They're poles, romanians, and serbians among others who are working their butts off. It's absurd to excuse rioters when there are people worse off a few suburbs away who are not going out into the streets.
The French government, over several generations, created this problem, much as the New Orleans and US politicians created the problem of the levees (you do realize that what failed were new walls built just a few years ago, right? It wasn't a lack of spending). The French government destroys far too many jobs with its economic interventions, creating the famed french social model. This means 10% unemployment is the norm. But that doesn't mean that Sarkozy was wrong.
Essentially, prior governments created little no-go areas all around France and that's just pure poison for a society. The current interior minister reversed that and the results are visible all over the Internet. You can buy peace by reestablishing the no-go areas and letting the cancer progress or you can excise it before it becomes completely unmanageable. It's France's choice.
I flat out don't agree that there is no way out of their situation. As for the US blacks of the 1960s, the 1960s was several decades after the Great Migration which saw blacks under much harsher conditions migrate in large numbers hundreds and thousands of miles.
Oh, the poor arabs and blacks! They can't make it on their own without having their hands held.
Actually, Intel did listen. That's why they're knifing their hot netburst technology several years early and moving to a cooler processor technology. This is also why Apple is moving to Intel processors. It's not that PPC couldn't keep up with the processor race in raw speed but that they weren't going to be able to keep those chips cool enough going forward.
There's a difference between a lie and a mistake. The trucks existed. We've found at least one of them. If the intelligence was wrong about them, that's a mistake. If they didn't exist and we knew they didn't exist, that's a lie. The charge of lying is unfounded as has been found by numerous reports both in the US and in other intelligence reviews internationally.
You've either got trouble with this language (you admit the problem is accuracy (were we right or not) and not necessarily veracity (did we tell the truth as we knew it at the time) in your own post) or you're badly peddling your own lie. I've known that the US has had a dysfunctional intelligence system for well over a decade and that dysfunctionality dates back at least to the Church committee geldings applied to the CIA. Periodically the US has this debate and the Democrats generally succeed in keeping idiotic restrictions on intelligence and often put new ones on like the Clinton gem that our intelligence agencies can't use felons as sources. Everybody in Al Queda is a felon, almost by definition. That's what makes them interesting, after all. Is it any surprise we couldn't penetrate that group?
President Bush, on several occasions that I personally heard broadcast, rejected the idea that Iraq was an imminent danger. Your assertion that he did so is inconsistent with the facts. The President's assertion was that Iraq had entered into the grey zone where we can't tell with sufficient precision whether they were an imminent danger or not. Considering all the intelligence failures uncovered since then, it's very likely that he had a good idea of how wide that grey zone was and we didn't. That's not quite something you want to be broadcasting on the public airwaves, though. "Hi, our intelligence agencies are so incompetent, we can't tell whether we need to bomb you next Tuesday" is something profoundly scary. No, you work like hell to fix the problem and pray that it doesn't become a practical difficulty in the meantime. Tenet was working halfway through a 14 year reform effort that was supposed to fix the issue of our dysfunctional intelligence system. Porter Goss is, no doubt, continuing the work.
The really scary bit is that several sections of the US government bureaucracy are only under loose control of the Executive. The CIA, as best I can tell, seems to be running intelligence operations against this White House (the Joe Wilson affair is front and center but by no means the only example). The DoD has been dangerously passive aggressive under both Clinton and George W Bush and those troop estimates are prime examples of it. The State Department is one huge Charlie Foxtrot and has been for decades, at least since Reagan when they were often dangerously insuburdinate by undercutting administration Soviet policy.
In 2005, there are areas whose security is guaranteed, top to bottom, by Iraqi government forces. These areas are growing all the time and we go in there under invitation only in those areas, mostly in the form of training advisors. Any normal Iraqi can construct a scenario where those areas grow to be 100% of the country and we're out entirely. The military reality is that it can take a couple of decades to train and mature a senior general. Somebody's going to be giving them advice and training for a long time. That's a very different proposition from being an occupying force.
As for Iran preparing Iraq to be the next Islamic state, you'd really have to be very naive about intra-Shia dynamics to worry much about that. The holy city of Najaf has its own scholars and the native Iraqi clerics fundamentally believe that the governing system of Iran is not only a non-performer, it is a Shia heresy. Najaf and Qom are for the Shia like Rome and Constantinople are for apostolic christians.
Iran's right to be scared because a functioning Iraq means that the view that they are heretics will ultimately win in the Shia religious councils and that means trouble for their personal, much less regime survival.
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This is astounding. A first post that actually addresses the subject and does it well. Kudos.
I just have one addition to the analysis, a stock market pricing model cheats the artists. Raising the price reduces the sales and limits the artist's influence in the culture. Artists who make 10x more off 1/10th of the sales lose out on their ancillary revenues such as concert tickets (they can't fill as large venues) and clothing even though their music income stays absolutely the same.
I think it quite likely that Windows CALs are being included as Windows Server sales. They are nothing of the sort. They are a license for client access, not software per se. You'd likely get very different revenue numbers if the server software was broken out from the CALs.
During the Tsunami crisis, the UN got caught repeatedly claiming credit for US national assistance. They weren't out in the field helping, just asking for money and doing really snazzy press conferences. The complaint isn't that poor people are being fed, but rather that they aren't while the UN claims credit for other's work.
Then there's the pedophila, food for sex scandals, the oil for palaces scandals, the whoring of Security Council votes, the list goes on and on. There's a lot not to like about the present, real world UN system, even in traditional areas of UN strength and competence.
The League of Nations came. The League of Nations went. We did better next round.
The UN came. The UN can very well go when it's no longer useful. We *can* do better in future.
The tricky part is in extracting the ITU and other useful bits who have entered the UN system as a logistical convenience. It is possible to do.
Asians are white? Who knew?
The biggest bugaboo in France up until the riots is about how the "polish plumbers" are going to take all the craft jobs away. With a French passport you can travel most anywhere. There's no reason why French passport holders who feel discriminated against in France can't come to the US. They aren't doing it though.
You are right about France sweeping things under the rug while the US talks about them. The capitalist system tends to force you to deal with things earlier while socialist systems enable a government to hide things for longer. The problems just fester, though and you end up worse off.
I think that it would be more productive to say that the system needs a negative feedback loop to rein it in when it goes too far. Whether that feedback loop can be found on the political left or elsewhere is an open question in my mind.
Capitalism has, as an advantage, the feature that it is an incomplete system. It's somewhat like a Unix utility. It does one thing (wealth creation and efficient allocation) really well and formally doesn't have anything to say about politics, social structures and habits, etc. You can have a capitalist system and vary in your political habits, much as the US and UK differ in their political arrangements but both are capitalist nations and get along with each other pretty well.
I perfectly understand the temptations of the buy, buy, buy consumer culture and how empty it leaves you spiritually. I have developed the ability to just stand up and chuck my TV in the basement when I think that my family has started wasting too much time at the tube (we did it for a few weeks last month because my 6 year old was getting too immersed in certain cartoons). This is very unusual behavior for a US middle class mid-west family. I actually lost the chance to be a Nielsen family because we didn't own a TV at the time.
My personal answer is being serious about my Eastern Catholic faith. YMMV.
Please provide a link or a cite to an approved human therapy for ESCs involving heart regeneration. Here's one for ASCs
B.E. Strauer et al., "Myocardial regeneration after intracoronary transplantation of human autologous stem cells following acute myocardial infarction," Dtsch Med Wochenschr 126, 932-938; Aug. 24, 2001.
Human autologous stem cells are adult stem cells, ASCs.
If you can't find actual human trials (successful ones that is) or therapies that aren't adult related, maybe you're the one who's promoting propaganda, but it isn't the religious, right-wing kind. If that's the case, maybe you might ask what interests would want to take credit for ASC progress and shine up the reputation of ESC methods?
Awaiting those cites/links...
It's been an allegation published in Nature during 2004, a journal that's usually more credible than "as single person". The controversy sat like a turd in the cloning punch bowl until now when a collaborator with his own considerable reputation decides to cut ties and resign from the project based on new evidence that he's received that Dr. Huang was lying. I tend to believe the US scientist. It's legitimate to say that the evidence hasn't been proven in a court of law but it's hardly an allegation made by a single person.
A huge chunk of the decrease in native american population was accidental disease spread in an era when disease transmission was largely terra incognito. This is not quite the same as piling up skulls in a campaign of genocide against your own people.
The homestead act gave you the land if you could bring in three crops in five years. Whoever taught you that killing natives was part of the bargain really miseducated you. If you paid for that, demand a refund.
People went with 12 hour days 6 days a week because the pay and conditions were improvements over the alternatives. Agriculture was harder work for less money, try 12+ hours seven days a week. As those farmers dried up, conditions would have improved regardless of communism's existence.
Capitalism features a government that acts as an honest referee. Government is pure coercive force and should not be for sale under either system. It's a system failure under both capitalist and communist governance when this happens. The real world use cases tend to be a bit more benign on the capitalism side. That doesn't make it right or a planned feature of the system.
Now men are not angels and systems will fail in the real world sometimes. The key is in honestly comparing how often they fail and what are the consequences as well as how bad are the recovery modes from those failures. In all those, I think that capitalism is much better than its competitors both in theory and real world practice.
People are obsessed with the economy because where the rubber hits the road, it determines whether your baby is going to die or there's going to be enough medicine available to treat the fever/runs/infection that would otherwise kill your child. Proper resource allocation is ultimately about life and death issues.
Government mandated health inspections are not a feature of an ideal capitalist society. They are a government intrusion on the economy (the free market solution is independent, competitive private inspectors). This isn't a commentary on whether government inspection of meat is good or bad, merely that complaining about how government inspection is done badly in the US is not an indictment of the US' capitalist aspects, but rather its socialist ones. Like every modern economy, the US has both systems working in parrallel. It's named a capitalist society in that the capitalist aspects predominate.
He's actually been accused of two things. One is taking eggs unethically. The second is lying about his research methods. The guy dissociating himself from the S. Korean researcher is doing so based on information that came to him on the second charge.
Then it wouldn't be organ donation but eminent domain. Private companies couldn't take it against your estate's will and the government would have to pay the going market rate. Nobody would be without estate if they have viable organs. A full set of organs would be tens of thousands of dollars at least.
I remember when interferon was going to cure cancer. Huge amounts of money got dumped into interferon research. It largely ended up a dry hole. Embryonic stem cell research could end up being a dry hole too. If the adult stem cell guys end up doing it better, cheaper ESC is doomed even if it does work.
So far, the ASC researchers are many years ahead of their ESC competitors. We have actual ASC therapies with many more in human trials. How many ESC therapies are in human trials? The last I heard, the number was zero. By the current state of the science ESC is a loser. So why is the government pouring billions into backing this loser instead of extending the already successful ASC methods further?
Schatten believed Huang's denials. He now has information that makes him doubt those denials. He's figured out that his colleague has been lying to his face for over a year. That's not evidence of being ok with forced egg donations/harvesting.
The research might be important. It certainly looks important at this early stage but if we already knew it was going to work, we wouldn't need to do the research at all, would we. There is a small but real percentage of women who die when they donate their eggs. They apparently got an unusually large number of eggs out of a few donors. All we really know for sure is that Huang lied to the public and his colleagues about at least one aspect of his research. The question then becomes whether this was the only lie.
It's absurd to defend this guy as if he did nothing wrong. He did. The only real question is whether this was an isolated incident or there's other problems with him. At the very least, he needs an ethics minder.
Maybe the fact that he has been lying about where he got the eggs for over a year might lead to a reasonable suspicion that there's something else unethical going on.
Or when did lying in your published research become ethical for a scientist?
People occasionally die from egg donation. It's always a very uncomfortable procedure, no matter what the results. This is why it's important to have true volunteers. All sorts of pressures can be applied to a subordinate in a lab and the overwhelming chances are that the boss will get away with it.
So, they took his master key away, restricted his access to the collections in a manner unique among his colleagues, reassigned him from the supervisor who was supportive of him to one who wasn't, and are just counting down the days to his renewal because they've blackballed him and have made sure that nobody will dare renew his sponsorship. Oh, they also spread vicious rumors about him in order to defame him professionally among his colleagues.
Nah, nothing happened to him at all.
The only reason the Smithsonian isn't in court right now is that the first avenue he went to protest didn't have proper jurisdiction. The SI's going to lose a major court case in a few years over this one.
Generally it's done via a comparative body count. You can't beat the Khmer Rouge in the % sweepstakes. They offed about a third of their population. Now that's revolutionary commitment!
Jesus wept.
The fundamental purpose of economics is to allocate goods and services efficiently by pricing their value correctly. Communism, of virtually all varieties, swear that they can do this pricing function better than capitalism. They never have. After so many decades, the default communist response to such a request is a quick change of subject or juvenile assertions that economics is not about efficient allocation.
Before the gulags and the death camps come along, there is the fundamental fact that communism can't set a price. All the subsequent violence stems from power mad people who won't make way when, once again, this fact is proven in the real world. There have been communist societies that didn't turn violent, the pre-marxian utopian experiments are a good example. Instead, they all shut themselves down when they figured out after a year or two that it was never going to work.
Only the ignorant and/or evil are communists these days.
As far as capitalism goes, it's funny how the closer to capitalism you get, the better your economic results get (compare economic growth rates and unemployment between France and the US). The closer you get to communism, the worse things become. The US is a capitalist state the same way that the USSR was a communist state. Both states followed their models imperfectly but where the US strays from principles, it performs worse economically, where the USSR strayed from principles (NEP period, for example) it performed much better.
There are a lot of people in Paris who speak poor french, have fewer rights than the 2nd & 3rd generation muslims who are in the streets rioting but these people aren't rioting. They're poles, romanians, and serbians among others who are working their butts off. It's absurd to excuse rioters when there are people worse off a few suburbs away who are not going out into the streets.
The French government, over several generations, created this problem, much as the New Orleans and US politicians created the problem of the levees (you do realize that what failed were new walls built just a few years ago, right? It wasn't a lack of spending). The French government destroys far too many jobs with its economic interventions, creating the famed french social model. This means 10% unemployment is the norm. But that doesn't mean that Sarkozy was wrong.
Essentially, prior governments created little no-go areas all around France and that's just pure poison for a society. The current interior minister reversed that and the results are visible all over the Internet. You can buy peace by reestablishing the no-go areas and letting the cancer progress or you can excise it before it becomes completely unmanageable. It's France's choice.
I flat out don't agree that there is no way out of their situation. As for the US blacks of the 1960s, the 1960s was several decades after the Great Migration which saw blacks under much harsher conditions migrate in large numbers hundreds and thousands of miles.
Oh, the poor arabs and blacks! They can't make it on their own without having their hands held.
Bull.
Actually, Intel did listen. That's why they're knifing their hot netburst technology several years early and moving to a cooler processor technology. This is also why Apple is moving to Intel processors. It's not that PPC couldn't keep up with the processor race in raw speed but that they weren't going to be able to keep those chips cool enough going forward.
There's a difference between a lie and a mistake. The trucks existed. We've found at least one of them. If the intelligence was wrong about them, that's a mistake. If they didn't exist and we knew they didn't exist, that's a lie. The charge of lying is unfounded as has been found by numerous reports both in the US and in other intelligence reviews internationally.
You've either got trouble with this language (you admit the problem is accuracy (were we right or not) and not necessarily veracity (did we tell the truth as we knew it at the time) in your own post) or you're badly peddling your own lie. I've known that the US has had a dysfunctional intelligence system for well over a decade and that dysfunctionality dates back at least to the Church committee geldings applied to the CIA. Periodically the US has this debate and the Democrats generally succeed in keeping idiotic restrictions on intelligence and often put new ones on like the Clinton gem that our intelligence agencies can't use felons as sources. Everybody in Al Queda is a felon, almost by definition. That's what makes them interesting, after all. Is it any surprise we couldn't penetrate that group?
President Bush, on several occasions that I personally heard broadcast, rejected the idea that Iraq was an imminent danger. Your assertion that he did so is inconsistent with the facts. The President's assertion was that Iraq had entered into the grey zone where we can't tell with sufficient precision whether they were an imminent danger or not. Considering all the intelligence failures uncovered since then, it's very likely that he had a good idea of how wide that grey zone was and we didn't. That's not quite something you want to be broadcasting on the public airwaves, though. "Hi, our intelligence agencies are so incompetent, we can't tell whether we need to bomb you next Tuesday" is something profoundly scary. No, you work like hell to fix the problem and pray that it doesn't become a practical difficulty in the meantime. Tenet was working halfway through a 14 year reform effort that was supposed to fix the issue of our dysfunctional intelligence system. Porter Goss is, no doubt, continuing the work.
The really scary bit is that several sections of the US government bureaucracy are only under loose control of the Executive. The CIA, as best I can tell, seems to be running intelligence operations against this White House (the Joe Wilson affair is front and center but by no means the only example). The DoD has been dangerously passive aggressive under both Clinton and George W Bush and those troop estimates are prime examples of it. The State Department is one huge Charlie Foxtrot and has been for decades, at least since Reagan when they were often dangerously insuburdinate by undercutting administration Soviet policy.
In 2005, there are areas whose security is guaranteed, top to bottom, by Iraqi government forces. These areas are growing all the time and we go in there under invitation only in those areas, mostly in the form of training advisors. Any normal Iraqi can construct a scenario where those areas grow to be 100% of the country and we're out entirely. The military reality is that it can take a couple of decades to train and mature a senior general. Somebody's going to be giving them advice and training for a long time. That's a very different proposition from being an occupying force.
As for Iran preparing Iraq to be the next Islamic state, you'd really have to be very naive about intra-Shia dynamics to worry much about that. The holy city of Najaf has its own scholars and the native Iraqi clerics fundamentally believe that the governing system of Iran is not only a non-performer, it is a Shia heresy. Najaf and Qom are for the Shia like Rome and Constantinople are for apostolic christians.
Iran's right to be scared because a functioning Iraq means that the view that they are heretics will ultimately win in the Shia religious councils and that means trouble for their personal, much less regime survival.