The Real News Network has this interview with some of the usual suspects, Rania Masri and Chris Hedges On Obama’s Syria Address.

MASRI: Now, for myself as an Arab American from the region, as somebody who’s been working on peace and social justice issues both here in the United States and in Lebanon, I have to say that although President Obama’s final conclusion was not surprising, his prelude to it was deeply, deeply offensive, deeply offensive, unethical, and ahistoric for him to sit there and to go on at length about these images of the children that have been gassed and how images of children that have been gassed have moved him to action was just repulsive, because the level of hypocrisy in that statement cannot be tolerated–the fact that it is the United States government also under his leadership that have funded and supported the Israeli use of white phosphorus against Palestinians in Gaza, the fact that it is the U.S. government that has themselves directly used white phosphorus against the Iraqis in Falluja. And it is the toxic legacy of the use of white phosphorus in Iraq that is actually greater than the toxic legacy of both the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as report that was published several years ago proved.

I may not be as radical as Rania Masri, but I did find the speech a little offensive. It might have been better for Obama to have quietly accepted the praise for having backed away from the brink of involvement in this war. His speech destroyed some of the goodwill I felt for him.

He seems so damn sure of things that he ought not to be so sure of. He may feel it necessary to talk the BS about our exceptionalism to satisfy the right wing in this country, but it makes me scream every time he does it. Has he absolutely no sense of history? Or does he know the history, but can still says what he does?

Computer World has the article Decline of Digital Equipment offers lessons for Microsoft. As an alumnus of DEC, I thought this would be an interesting story to follow.

“There’s something endemic in technology companies that they are not built to last,” said Peter DeLisi, founder and president of Organizational Synergies, a Fremont, Calif. strategy consulting firm. “The larger and larger they become, the more they spin out of control. In a highly empowered culture like Microsoft or DEC, the pieces are loosely held together. And in a crisis, down they go.”

When I first heard of Microsoft buying Nokia, I thought this was an example of a company, Microsoft, that had failed to catch the next wave in its industry buying another company, Nokia, that failed to catch the next wave in its industry.  What could the two companies teach each other?  Then I heard that the CEO of Nokia was a former employee of Microsoft and a candidate to become CEO of Microsoft after the merger.  So he can come to Microsoft and fail to do for them what he failed to do for Nokia.

I had not thought of Bob Palmer at DEC, until reading the article mentioned above.  While Palmer had not been a former employee of DEC before being hired to head the group that I was in, he had lead another semiconductor company into bankruptcy.  I got out of DEC in 1988, when i could see the handwriting on the wall.  Bob Palmer became President of DEC a little while after I left.  At that point, I knew I had made the right decision to leave.

Of all the people in DEC who wouldn’t have a clue as to what DEC needed to rescue itself, I put Bob Palmer at the head of the list.

Reader RayS suggests the book The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business as a better read than the analyses of Peter DeLisi.

In the conversation about this blog post that is on my Facebook page, Ray said:

This book is must-reading for anyone who wants to understand what happened to DEC and what’s happening to Microsoft.

Long story short, it is almost impossible for an industry leader to “catch the next wave. There is no point in their business life where it makes sense to switch.”

As I think about it, I realize that Microsoft’s insistence that everything it does must be compatible with Windows is similar to DEC’s thinking that all its new products had to be VAX compatible.  The VAX was an industry leading computer at the time DEC started its descent.

In other conversations, this problem has been called the drag of having an installed base.  In an effort to keep your installed base of customers happy and able to buy your new products, you fail to see how you can make a new product that is a clean break from all of your old products.  You may even recognize that you need to do it, but you just cannot figure out how.  There are probably just as many companies who did see the need, tried to do it, and were right that they could not figure out how.

CBS News has the article Syria says it “welcomes” Russian proposal to place chemical weapons under international control.

MOSCOW Syria’s foreign minister says his country welcomes Russia’s proposal for it to place its chemical weapons under international control and then dismantle them quickly to avert U.S. strikes.

Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem stopped short of saying that the Syrian government had actually accepted the proposal

“I state that the Syrian Arab Republic welcomes the Russian initiative, motivated by the Syrian leadership’s concern for the lives of our citizens and the security of our country, and also motivated by our confidence in the wisdom of the Russian leadership, which is attempting to prevent American aggression against our people,” he said.

The statement came a few hours after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Syrian President Bashar Assad could resolve the crisis surrounding the alleged use of chemical weapons by his forces by surrendering control of “every single bit” of his arsenal to the international community by the end of the week.

There are lots of positive things to say about this development.

1. If this was Obama’s original intent in making the threats, then it was a brilliant play.
2. If all the protesting about the Obama plan lead to Kerry’s attempt to find a diplomatic out, then it was all worth it.
3. Perhaps Russia’s intransigents in the UN Security Council was a good thing, and that veto power is also a good thing.
4. Insisting on all out diplomacy (not pressure) is the best way to try to resolve issues like this.
5. This could be a first step in finding a diplomatic resolution to the war itself.  Maybe the external forces with their competing self-interests have come to realize that supporting one side of a war is a dangerous way to achieve their economic goals.

Apparently the offer came as a result of an offhand comment that John Kerry made at a press conference when a reporter asked if there were anything Assad could do to stave off a US attack. John Kerry made the extreme demand that Assad put the chemical weapons under international control by the end of the week.

So apparently, President Obama and all his spokespeople were wrong when they said that every diplomatic effort had been exhausted before they decided to attack.  (If the threats of attack were a ploy to move diplomacy forward, perhaps the administration can be forgiven.  Of course, as in poker, never show your hand if the opponent does not call your bet. If you intend to continue to play, you don’t want your opponent to develop a sense of when you bluff and when you don’t.  So we will never know if this was a ploy.  Or we should not ever know unless someone is fool enough to uncover the answer.)

McClatchy news has the story Is it Syria or Obama? GOP turning anti-war.

The Republican Party may be turning anti-war.

Some of the shift is driven by visceral distrust of President Barack Obama, who is the one proposing military strikes against Syria. Some is driven by remorse and lessons learned from the Iraq war. And some is fed by the isolationist and libertarian strains of the grassroots tea party movement.

I just have to include the quote from Sarah Palin.

In 2008, GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was an impassioned supporter of the Iraq war. Now, in a Facebook post titled “Let Allah Sort It Out,” she argued against military action in Syria. “If our invasion of Iraq wasn’t enough of a deterrent to stop evil men from using chemical weapons on their own people, why do we think this will be?” she asked.

This may be the most sensible and profound thing that I have ever heard Sarah Palin say.  Other Republican Senators are saying sensible things that I wish they would have been saying when George Bush was the President.  If President Obama has actually managed to the the Republican Party into an anti-war party, then maybe he does deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, as one commenter observed.

The quote they have for Elizabeth Warren troubles me.

What the Assad regime did is reprehensible, but we have to consider what’s in America’s best interest.

With what Elizabeth Warren has been able to find out about the actions of our government during the banking crisis and its aftermath, I would hope that she could use some of her skepticism on the claim that it was Assad that carried out the attack.  I know that foreign policy is not her claim to expertise.  However, I hope she isn’t so naive to think that the people who helped precipitate a financial collapse and declare their innocence, are not above prevarication about foreign policy matters.

Besides looking at the statistics at the bottom of the blog:

This page has been read 1,187,467 times from 76,922 internet addresses.

there are other methods of measuring the success of a blog.

Perhaps my blogs posts about the Syrian war efforts are really getting to some people.  Or perhaps the NSA is after me.

I have found that someone has been trying to break into the administrative account of this blog.  Fortunately, the WordPress software which runs this blog was able to detect the break in attempt.  It also gave me enough info to start to track the perpetrator.

I was able to contact the ISP of the attempted intruder. I have already received the following response only about an hour after I reported it this Sunday morning.

Thank you for contacting us. We take abuse issues very seriously. We are looking into the cause of this, and will reply back to you as soon as possible.

Well, it was not the blog content that attracted this person.  Looking at the statistics I collect, I was able to determine that it was one of many attempts by many IP addresses to get into my blog administrative account today.  These addresses never actually access any pages in the blog, they just try to break in because they can try.  The administrative account and my personal account have strong passwords which along with other protective measures keeps these attempts from succeeding.

President Obama, American public opinion is providing you the last exit before you hit the quagmire.  Why not show how you are different from all the Presidents and other world leaders that went before you by taking this exit?

or is a better caption

Well punk, do you feel lucky?

The Atlantic has the article Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 1: Stevenson and Lofgren.

Here are two of the items from Mike Lofgren that are quoted in the article.

1. The administration’s declassified intelligence summary of the chemical weapons incident  reads like a White House lawyer’s advocacy brief rather than a neutral assessment of evidence. Some of it is just circular reasoning, asserting as fact that which ought to be proven. Also, it uses up a paragraph refuting a hypothetical which was never a significant issue: no serious person, to my knowledge, ever asserted that a gas attack never happened….  Otherwise, the paper says, in effect, “we have the intelligence back-up, but you, the public can’t see it. Trust us.” That really worked out well in the past, didn’t it?
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4. Many have criticized Obama’s “red lines” statement as poor policymaking, like writing a post-dated check and not worrying whether someone would cash it. Obama was buying time, while simultaneously narrowing his future options. His domestic negotiations proceed exactly like that: he accepted the sequester he didn’t want to buy time for the debt limit increase. Obama negotiated with himself on the fiscal cliff deal, and thereby retained the vast majority of the Bush tax cuts when they would have expired anyway.

This article is the one I promised to search for in my previous post Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 2: William Polk.

The Atlantic has the article Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 2: William Polk. At the end of this blog post, I’ll give credit to the instigator of my search for this article.  I can only give a hint to the value of reading this article by posting a small part of the 13th and final question addressed by the article.

13:      So what could we possibly gain from an attack on Syria?
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Finally, if the missile attacks do succeed in “degrading” the Syrian government,  it may read the signs as indicating that fighting the war is acceptable so long as chemical weapons are not employed. They may regard it as a sort of license to go ahead in this wasting war.   Thus, the action will have accomplished little.  Thus,  as General Zinni points out, America will likely find itself saddled with another long-term, very expensive and perhaps unwinnable war.   We need to remind ourselves what Afghanistan did – bankrupting the Soviet Union  – and what Iraq cost us — about 4,500 American dead, over 100,000 wounded, many of whom will never recover, and perhaps $6 trillion.

Can we afford to repeat those mistakes?

Read the rest of the article for much, much more.

President Obama, American public opinion is providing you the last exit before you hit the quagmire.  Why not show how you are different from all the Presidents and other world leaders that went before you by taking this exit?

Now for the credits.  In a comment on my previous post, Obama Warned on Syrian Intel, reader MardyS suggested the article quoted above by way of Bill Moyers staff’s article Trying to Make Sense of Syria? Here’s Our Essential Reader.  I found the Moyers article it by using the title given by Mardy and putting it into a Google search.

The Moyers article is where I found the link to The Atlantic article Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 2: William Polk.

At this point Sharon, my SO, is getting hungry (as am I), and wants me to stop picking loose threads and unraveling any more sweaters.  This is the reason why I have not yet searched for the hinted at Part 1 of this article.

After dinner, I found Your Labor Day Syria Reader, Part 1: Stevenson and Lofgren.

The New York Times story Reports of Syria Chemical Attack Spur Question: Why?, published ages ago (over a week ago) on August 27, 2013 has recently come to my attention.

Still, the government is not monolithic. There are different power centers within its security forces, and some analysts have speculated that Mr. Assad’s brother Maher, the leader of the feared Republican Guard, could have given the order, or that it was carried out by irregular forces. Evidence from videos and witnesses suggested that the toxic substances in last week’s attack were delivered by improvised tube-launched missiles that could be used by smaller, more mobile units than were thought to be needed for chemical weapons.

The part about the tube-launched missiles was used by somebody referring to this article to make the case for the rebels having perpetrated the attack.  The actual article in The New York Times is more inclined to blame it on factions in the Syrian government than it is to blame it on the rebels.

I decided to throw this in just in case you hear one side of the argument.  I didn’t want you to go away thinking that you had actually learned something on which you could rely.

The Consortium News has published the open letter to the President headlined Obama Warned on Syrian Intel.

Exclusive: Despite the Obama administration’s supposedly “high confidence” regarding Syrian government guilt over the Aug. 21 chemical attack near Damascus, a dozen former U.S. military and intelligence officials are telling President Obama that they are picking up information that undercuts the Official Story.

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President

FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

SUBJECT: Is Syria a Trap?

Precedence: IMMEDIATE

We regret to inform you that some of our former co-workers are telling us, categorically, that contrary to the claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21, and that British intelligence officials also know this. In writing this brief report, we choose to assume that you have not been fully informed because your advisers decided to afford you the opportunity for what is commonly known as “plausible denial.”

Just as I was about to think that maybe there might be some credibility in the President’s case, the other side rolls out some heavy artillery (if true).  Perhaps this is just fake mockups of heavy artillery to fool the other side.

As Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden seem to show, whistle-blowers are the only source of honest information about what our government is doing.  No wonder President Obama has been trying so hard to intimidate any would-be whistle-blower.