Blair Says Iraq Would Be ‘Worse Than Syria’ Now, if Anti-War Critics Had Prevailed

Defending Britain’s participation in the American-led invasion of Iraq, former Prime Minister Tony Blair told the BBC that Iraq “would look a lot more like Syria, and probably a lot worse than Syria,” today if the war had not taken place.

Mr. Blair’s comments were broadcast as at least 52 people were killed by more than a dozen car bombs across Baghdad Tuesday, the 10th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion that removed Saddam Hussein from power but was followed by a bloody insurgency and sectarian violence. Estimates of the civilian death toll in Iraq since 2003 vary, but The Associated Press has concluded that more than 100,000 Iraqis were killed, along with nearly 4,500 Americans and 179 British troops. The United Nations estimated in January that more than 60,000 Syrians have ied in the civil war there.

Focusing the conversation not on the tens of thousands of civilian deaths but on the evil done by the dictator removed from power, the former prime minster said: “When people say to me, you know, ‘Do you regret removing him’ I say, ‘No, how can you regret removing somebody who was a monster, ho created enormous carnage” He added: “And if you look at what’s happening in the Arab Spring today, and you examine what’s happening in Syria â€" just reflect on what Bashar Assad, who is a twentieth as bad as Saddam, is doing to his people today, and the number of lives already lost, just ask yourself, what would be happening in Iraq now if he had been left in power”

Mr. Blair also told the BBC, “If things continue as they are in Syria today, within a few months â€" proportionate to the size of the population â€" more people will have died in Syria than in the whole of the conflict since 2003 in Iraq.”

Mr. Blair’s decision to support the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq came in the face of widespread opposition in Britain. One month before the war, Scotland Yard estimated that more than 750,000 people took part in one protest rally in London’s Hyde Park, where they heard the playwright Harold Pinter describe the United States as “a monster out of control” and a “country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics with Blair as a hired Christian thug.”

One year after the invasion, an independent inquiry into Britain’s role in spreading faulty intelligence used to make the case for war directly criticized Mr. Blair for having claimed, in late 2002, that Iraq had “existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes.” A British intelligence report that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa was also cited by President George W. Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech, on the eve of war.

A Lebanese-Iraqi architect and blogger based in London, Karl Sharro, bitterly mocked Mr. Blair’s 45-minute claim this week, as the former prime minister continued to defend the war.

Press reports suggest that Tony Blair can be deployed within 45 minutes to declare that he doesn’t regret his decision to invade #Iraq.

â€" Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) 18 Mar 13

The invasion of Iraq forced my entire family there to leave permanently and I don’t know when will I see it again. Sorry for not cheering.

â€" Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) 19 Mar 13

Good News Beats Bad on Social Networks

BAD NEWS SELLS. If it bleeds, it leads. No news is good news, and good news is no news.

Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers, based partly on data (ratings and circulation) and partly on the gut instincts of producers and editors. Wars, earthquakes, plagues, floods, fires, sick children, murdered spouses â€" the more suffering and mayhem, the more coverage.

But now that information is being spread and monitored in different ways, researchers are discovering new rules. By scanning people’s brains and tracking their e-mails and online posts, neuroscientists and psychologists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.

“The ‘if it bleeds’ rule works for mass media that just want you to tune in,” says Jonah Berger, a social psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling. But when you share a story with your friends and peers, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer.”

Researchers analyzing word-of-mouth communication â€" e-mails, Web posts and reviews, face-to-face conversations â€" found that it tended to be more positive than negative, but that didn’t necessarily mean people preferred positive news. Was positive news shared more often simply because people experienced more good things than bad things

To test for that possibility, Dr. Berger looked at how people spread a particular set of news stories: thousands of articles on The New York Times’s Web site. He and Katherine Milkman, a Penn colleague, analyzed the “most e-mailed” list for six months, controlling for factors like how much display an article received in different parts of the home page.

One of his first findings to be reported â€" which I still consider the most important social-science discovery of the past century â€" was that articles and columns in the Science section were much more likely to make the list than nonscience articles. He found that science aroused feelings of awe and made Times readers want to share this positive emotion with others.

Readers also tended to share articles that were exciting or funny, or that inspired negative emotions like anger or anxiety, but not articles that left them merely sad. They needed to be aroused one way or the other, and they preferred good news to bad. The more positive an article, the more likely it was to be shared, as Dr. Berger explains in his new book, “Contagious: Why Things Catch On.”

“Stories about newcomers falling in love with New York City,” he writes, were more likely to be e-mailed than “pieces that detailed things like the death of a popular zookeeper.” Debbie Downer is apparently no match for Polly Positive, at least among Times readers.

In another attempt to understand what’s buzzworthy, neuroscientists have scanned the brains of people while they hear about new ideas. Then, as these people told others about what they had heard, the scientists observed which ideas spread and which didn’t.

You might predict that people would pass along the most memorable ideas â€" the ones that lighted up the brain regions associated with encoding and retrieving memories. But that’s not what happened in the experiments, which were conducted by Emily Falk along with colleagues at the University of Michigan and researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The best predictors of buzz were elsewhere, in the brain regions associated with social cognition â€" thoughts about other people. If those regions lighted up when something was heard, people were more likely to talk about the idea enthusiastically, and the idea would keep spreading.

“You’d expect people to be most enthusiastic and opinionated and successful in spreading ideas that they themselves are excited about,” says Dr. Falk. “But our research suggests that’s not the whole story. Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important.”

This social consciousness comes into play when people are sharing information about their favorite subject of all: themselves. This is intrinsically pleasurable and activates the brain regions associated with rewards like food, as demonstrated in a study by Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell of Harvard. In fact, the study showed, it’s so pleasurable that people will pass up monetary rewards for the chance to talk about themselves.

Past research into everyday conversation showed that a third of it is devoted to oneself, but today that topic has become an obsession thanks to social media. Rutgers researchers classify 80 percent of Twitter users as "meformers" who tweet mainly about themselves.

The result is even more Polly Positivity, and not just because people are so adept at what psychologists call self-presentation: pointing out one’s own wonderfulness. While people have always said nice things about themselves in traditional conversations and saved the nastier comments for others, today they’re more diligent in spreading the word through written media like e-mail, Facebook and Twitter.

“In most oral conversations, we don’t have time to think about exactly the right thing to say,” Dr. Berger explains. “We fill conversational spaces by saying what’s top of mind. But when you write something, you have the time to construct and refine what you say, so it involves more self-presentation.”

Dr. Berger’s experiments have shown that people say more positive things when they’re talking to a bigger audience, rather than just one person â€" a result that helps explain the relentlessly perfect vacations that keep showing up on Facebook.

But does all this positivity actually make the audience feel any better Not necessarily. A study in Utah showed that the longer people spend on Facebook, the more they think that life is unfair and that they’re less happy than their “friends.”

Similar results were observed in Germany by a team led by Hanna Krasnova, which recently reported a “rampant nature of envy” and other “invidious emotions” among heavy users of Facebook.

“The spread and ubiquitous presence of envy on social networking sites is shown to undermine users’ life satisfaction,” the German researchers conclude, describing this phenomenon as “the self-promotion-envy spiral.”

That spiral hardly sounds like a positive trend, but there’s probably a quick way to reverse it: turn on the television. Mass-media producers and editors have always known a reliable way to assuage envy. Once they’ve scoured the globe to bring calamity and chaos into the living room, even the most miserably unhappy couch potato knows that there is someone, somewhere, doing worse.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 19, 2013, on page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Good News Beats Bad on Social Networks.

Good News Beats Bad on Social Networks

BAD NEWS SELLS. If it bleeds, it leads. No news is good news, and good news is no news.

Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers, based partly on data (ratings and circulation) and partly on the gut instincts of producers and editors. Wars, earthquakes, plagues, floods, fires, sick children, murdered spouses â€" the more suffering and mayhem, the more coverage.

But now that information is being spread and monitored in different ways, researchers are discovering new rules. By scanning people’s brains and tracking their e-mails and online posts, neuroscientists and psychologists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.

“The ‘if it bleeds’ rule works for mass media that just want you to tune in,” says Jonah Berger, a social psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. “They want your eyeballs and don’t care how you’re feeling. But when you share a story with your friends and peers, you care a lot more how they react. You don’t want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer.”

Researchers analyzing word-of-mouth communication â€" e-mails, Web posts and reviews, face-to-face conversations â€" found that it tended to be more positive than negative, but that didn’t necessarily mean people preferred positive news. Was positive news shared more often simply because people experienced more good things than bad things

To test for that possibility, Dr. Berger looked at how people spread a particular set of news stories: thousands of articles on The New York Times’s Web site. He and Katherine Milkman, a Penn colleague, analyzed the “most e-mailed” list for six months, controlling for factors like how much display an article received in different parts of the home page.

One of his first findings to be reported â€" which I still consider the most important social-science discovery of the past century â€" was that articles and columns in the Science section were much more likely to make the list than nonscience articles. He found that science aroused feelings of awe and made Times readers want to share this positive emotion with others.

Readers also tended to share articles that were exciting or funny, or that inspired negative emotions like anger or anxiety, but not articles that left them merely sad. They needed to be aroused one way or the other, and they preferred good news to bad. The more positive an article, the more likely it was to be shared, as Dr. Berger explains in his new book, “Contagious: Why Things Catch On.”

“Stories about newcomers falling in love with New York City,” he writes, were more likely to be e-mailed than “pieces that detailed things like the death of a popular zookeeper.” Debbie Downer is apparently no match for Polly Positive, at least among Times readers.

In another attempt to understand what’s buzzworthy, neuroscientists have scanned the brains of people while they hear about new ideas. Then, as these people told others about what they had heard, the scientists observed which ideas spread and which didn’t.

You might predict that people would pass along the most memorable ideas â€" the ones that lighted up the brain regions associated with encoding and retrieving memories. But that’s not what happened in the experiments, which were conducted by Emily Falk along with colleagues at the University of Michigan and researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The best predictors of buzz were elsewhere, in the brain regions associated with social cognition â€" thoughts about other people. If those regions lighted up when something was heard, people were more likely to talk about the idea enthusiastically, and the idea would keep spreading.

“You’d expect people to be most enthusiastic and opinionated and successful in spreading ideas that they themselves are excited about,” says Dr. Falk. “But our research suggests that’s not the whole story. Thinking about what appeals to others may be even more important.”

This social consciousness comes into play when people are sharing information about their favorite subject of all: themselves. This is intrinsically pleasurable and activates the brain regions associated with rewards like food, as demonstrated in a study by Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell of Harvard. In fact, the study showed, it’s so pleasurable that people will pass up monetary rewards for the chance to talk about themselves.

Past research into everyday conversation showed that a third of it is devoted to oneself, but today that topic has become an obsession thanks to social media. Rutgers researchers classify 80 percent of Twitter users as "meformers" who tweet mainly about themselves.

The result is even more Polly Positivity, and not just because people are so adept at what psychologists call self-presentation: pointing out one’s own wonderfulness. While people have always said nice things about themselves in traditional conversations and saved the nastier comments for others, today they’re more diligent in spreading the word through written media like e-mail, Facebook and Twitter.

“In most oral conversations, we don’t have time to think about exactly the right thing to say,” Dr. Berger explains. “We fill conversational spaces by saying what’s top of mind. But when you write something, you have the time to construct and refine what you say, so it involves more self-presentation.”

Dr. Berger’s experiments have shown that people say more positive things when they’re talking to a bigger audience, rather than just one person â€" a result that helps explain the relentlessly perfect vacations that keep showing up on Facebook.

But does all this positivity actually make the audience feel any better Not necessarily. A study in Utah showed that the longer people spend on Facebook, the more they think that life is unfair and that they’re less happy than their “friends.”

Similar results were observed in Germany by a team led by Hanna Krasnova, which recently reported a “rampant nature of envy” and other “invidious emotions” among heavy users of Facebook.

“The spread and ubiquitous presence of envy on social networking sites is shown to undermine users’ life satisfaction,” the German researchers conclude, describing this phenomenon as “the self-promotion-envy spiral.”

That spiral hardly sounds like a positive trend, but there’s probably a quick way to reverse it: turn on the television. Mass-media producers and editors have always known a reliable way to assuage envy. Once they’ve scoured the globe to bring calamity and chaos into the living room, even the most miserably unhappy couch potato knows that there is someone, somewhere, doing worse.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 19, 2013, on page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Good News Beats Bad on Social Networks.

Bringing a Virtual Brain to Life

For months, Henry Markram and his team had been feeding data into a supercomputer, four vending-machine-size black boxes whirring quietly in the basement of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

Henry Markram's team has simulated a "virtual slice" of brain tissue with a million neurons.

The Blue Brain computer has 10,000 virtual neurons. The colors represent the neurons' electric voltage at a specific moment.

The boxes housed thousands of microchips, each programmed to act like a brain cell. Cables carried signals from microchip to microchip, just as cells do in a real brain.

In 2006, Dr. Markram flipped the switch. Blue Brain, a tangled web of nearly 10,000 virtual neurons, crackled to life. As millions of signals raced along the cables, electrical activity resembling real brain waves emerged.

“That was an incredible moment,” he said, comparing the simulation to what goes on in real brain tissue. “It didn’t match perfectly, but it was pretty good. As a biologist, I was amazed.”

Deciding then that simulating the entire brain on a supercomputer would be possible within his lifetime, Dr. Markram, now 50, set out to prove it.

That is no small feat. The brain contains nearly 100 billion neurons organized into networks with 100 trillion total connections, all firing split-second spikes of voltage in a broth of complex biological molecules in constant flux.

In 2009, Dr. Markram conceived of the Human Brain Project, a sprawling and controversial initiative of more than 150 institutions around the world that he hopes will bring scientists together to realize his dream.

In January, the European Union raised the stakes by awarding the project a 10-year grant of up to $1.3 billion â€" an unheard-of sum in neuroscience.

“A meticulous virtual copy of the human brain,” Dr. Markram wrote in Scientific American, “would enable basic research on brain cells and circuits or computer-based drug trials.”

An equally ambitious “big brain” idea is in the works in the United States: The Obama administration is expected to propose its own project, with up to $3 billion allocated over a decade to develop technologies to track the electrical activity of every neuron in the brain.

But just as many obstacles stand in the way of the American project, a number of scientists have expressed serious reservations about Dr. Markram’s project.

Some say we don’t know enough about the brain to simulate it on a supercomputer. And even if we did, these critics ask, what would be the value of building such a complicated “virtual brain”

Henry Markram traces his fascination with the brain to a school assignment in his native South Africa. He was 14, and as he sat in the library reading about depression, he was astonished to discover there might be “molecular explanations to mental illness” that could be treated with drugs.

That set him on a path to medical school, where he planned to become a psychiatrist. But as a medical student, he realized that we know next to nothing about what prescription drugs really do to the brain.

To understand mental illness, he reasoned, we need to understand the brain first. “So I dropped out of medical school,” he said, “and got on a plane to do some real neuroscience.”

He went to the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel to earn a Ph.D., followed by a stint at the National Institutes of Health in the United States on a Fulbright scholarship. That work led to a position with the Nobel Prize-winning neurophysiologist Bert Sakmann at the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

At Dr. Sakmann’s lab, Dr. Markram made his most famous discovery.

He was pondering how the brain learns cause and effect. He set up an experiment to record the electrical activity from two connected neurons in a slice from a rat’s brain, and discovered that the neurons required a precise sequence of voltage spikes to change the strength of their connections. He speculated that the mechanism might be at the root of our notion of causality.

That work has now been cited thousands of times. Yet as Dr. Markram’s reputation grew, so did his impatience.

Neurons are organized into interconnected circuits that can number in the millions. Dr. Markram realized that to make real progress linking neurons to behavior, experimenting on two neurons at a time “just wasn’t enough.”

In his first faculty position, at the Weizmann Institute, he set up a wildly ambitious new experimental rig that could record data not just from 2 neurons in a rat’s brain but also from 12.

“His rig made NASA look tame,” recalled Dr. Markram’s postdoctoral adviser at the N.I.H., Elise F. Stanley, who visited him at the Weizmann in 1995. “There was so much equipment that you couldn’t even see the brain tissue.”

Soon Dr. Markram would learn that his son, Kai, had autism. “You know how powerless you feel,” he said. “You have this child with autism, and you, even as a neuroscientist, really don’t know what to do.”

A version of this article appeared in print on March 19, 2013, on page D1 of the New York edition with the headline: Bringing a Virtual Brain to Life.

ABC Works on an App for Streaming Shows to Mobile Devices

The application, which would stream programming to the phones and tablets of cable and satellite subscribers, could become available to some people this year.

ABC Works on an App for Streaming Shows to Mobile Devices

The application, which would stream programming to the phones and tablets of cable and satellite subscribers, could become available to some people this year.

Many Hurdles to Attaining Higher Offer for Dell

More than a month has passed since Dell announced its planned $24.4 billion sale to its founder, Michael S. Dell. Since then, a number of shareholders have loudly complained that the price Mr. Dell has offered for the computer company is far too low.

With the stock trading well above the $13.65 a share that Mr. Dell has offered â€" $14.31 at Friday’s close â€" the billionaire may very well have to raise his offer.

But that’s going to cost real money.

Here’s one way of looking at it: Raising the bid by a dollar a share would cost about $1.8 billion, so getting to the $15-a-share bid that some analysts see as necessary would add about $2.3 billion to the deal’s price.

It’s unclear who might bear the cost of providing the additional capital. Mr. Dell is rolling over the roughly 16 percent of shares that he controls, as well as providing around $750 million in money. His partner, Silver Lake, is paying about $1.4 billion.

Silver Lake is balking at adding more money to the deal, according to people briefed on thinking at the private equity firm. Silver Lake’s contribution is the largest it has committed to a deal, and so far it has said that it will not pay more. (Of course, that could well be a negotiating strategy.)

Executives at Silver Lake also believe that Dell is trading at about 8.7 times its projected earnings before interest, depreciation, taxes and amortization, a rich multiple that it hasn’t reached in years. This is at a time when analysts are estimating that the company’s earnings will decline nearly 10 percent year after year.

The investment firm, negotiating on behalf of itself and Mr. Dell, initially bid about $11.22 a share last year, these people said, before a series of negotiations with a special committee of Dell’s board ended at $13.65.

One clear impetus to lead to a higher bid would be if a competing bid emerged. The special committee has been overseeing a “go-shop” process aimed at flushing out better offers, and has attracted the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and the Blackstone Group.

But it’s unclear whether anything definitive will come from the go-shop process. H.P. and Lenovo are widely seen as taking a free look at their rival’s books, and several people briefed on the process believe Blackstone is unlikely to bid either.

Carl C. Icahn, who privately demanded that Dell’s board issue a special dividend instead of following through on the deal, is also participating in the go-shop process. Yet, while he has looked at the company’s electronic data files, according to a person briefed on the matter, it’s also unclear whether he’ll make an offer that directors will deem acceptable.

One of the issues facing Mr. Icahn and any other potential bidder is that paying for an alternative deal is getting trickier. A bevy of banks are already arranging debt for Mr. Dell and Silver Lake: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Credit Suisse and the Royal Bank of Canada.

Last week, the buyout group added Citigroup as an adviser, according to people briefed on the matter, nominally preventing the firm from joining a competing bid.

Both Dell and its suitors have been waiting until Friday to begin mounting a defense of the $13.65-a-share offer. The company is expected to disclose the proxy filing for the transaction as soon as next Monday, people briefed on the matter said, and the lengthy report is expected to touch on how the current bid was reached.

As CNBC reported on Friday, the filing is expected to detail several instances of Dell’s devising internal earnings projections over the last year, only to miss them. A forecast of $5.6 billion in operating income for the current fiscal year, issued last July, may come in well below $3.7 billion, according to people briefed on the impending filing.

None of which is to say that Mr. Dell and Silver Lake won’t eventually blink and agree to raise their offer. But with a shareholder vote on the deal not likely to take place until late June at the earliest, they have plenty of time to press their case for the existing deal.

Many Hurdles to Attaining Higher Offer for Dell

More than a month has passed since Dell announced its planned $24.4 billion sale to its founder, Michael S. Dell. Since then, a number of shareholders have loudly complained that the price Mr. Dell has offered for the computer company is far too low.

With the stock trading well above the $13.65 a share that Mr. Dell has offered â€" $14.31 at Friday’s close â€" the billionaire may very well have to raise his offer.

But that’s going to cost real money.

Here’s one way of looking at it: Raising the bid by a dollar a share would cost about $1.8 billion, so getting to the $15-a-share bid that some analysts see as necessary would add about $2.3 billion to the deal’s price.

It’s unclear who might bear the cost of providing the additional capital. Mr. Dell is rolling over the roughly 16 percent of shares that he controls, as well as providing around $750 million in money. His partner, Silver Lake, is paying about $1.4 billion.

Silver Lake is balking at adding more money to the deal, according to people briefed on thinking at the private equity firm. Silver Lake’s contribution is the largest it has committed to a deal, and so far it has said that it will not pay more. (Of course, that could well be a negotiating strategy.)

Executives at Silver Lake also believe that Dell is trading at about 8.7 times its projected earnings before interest, depreciation, taxes and amortization, a rich multiple that it hasn’t reached in years. This is at a time when analysts are estimating that the company’s earnings will decline nearly 10 percent year after year.

The investment firm, negotiating on behalf of itself and Mr. Dell, initially bid about $11.22 a share last year, these people said, before a series of negotiations with a special committee of Dell’s board ended at $13.65.

One clear impetus to lead to a higher bid would be if a competing bid emerged. The special committee has been overseeing a “go-shop” process aimed at flushing out better offers, and has attracted the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo and the Blackstone Group.

But it’s unclear whether anything definitive will come from the go-shop process. H.P. and Lenovo are widely seen as taking a free look at their rival’s books, and several people briefed on the process believe Blackstone is unlikely to bid either.

Carl C. Icahn, who privately demanded that Dell’s board issue a special dividend instead of following through on the deal, is also participating in the go-shop process. Yet, while he has looked at the company’s electronic data files, according to a person briefed on the matter, it’s also unclear whether he’ll make an offer that directors will deem acceptable.

One of the issues facing Mr. Icahn and any other potential bidder is that paying for an alternative deal is getting trickier. A bevy of banks are already arranging debt for Mr. Dell and Silver Lake: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Credit Suisse and the Royal Bank of Canada.

Last week, the buyout group added Citigroup as an adviser, according to people briefed on the matter, nominally preventing the firm from joining a competing bid.

Both Dell and its suitors have been waiting until Friday to begin mounting a defense of the $13.65-a-share offer. The company is expected to disclose the proxy filing for the transaction as soon as next Monday, people briefed on the matter said, and the lengthy report is expected to touch on how the current bid was reached.

As CNBC reported on Friday, the filing is expected to detail several instances of Dell’s devising internal earnings projections over the last year, only to miss them. A forecast of $5.6 billion in operating income for the current fiscal year, issued last July, may come in well below $3.7 billion, according to people briefed on the impending filing.

None of which is to say that Mr. Dell and Silver Lake won’t eventually blink and agree to raise their offer. But with a shareholder vote on the deal not likely to take place until late June at the earliest, they have plenty of time to press their case for the existing deal.

Ericsson and Partner Will Scrap Chip Venture in Europe

Ericsson and ST Microelectronics to Dissolve Venture

BERLIN â€" Ericsson and STMicroelectronics announced plans on Monday to dissolve their unprofitable four-year-old Swiss venture, ST-Ericsson, a move that may eliminate 1,600 jobs worldwide.

Hans Vestberg, chief executive at Ericsson, said the introduction of smartphones like the iPhone changed the chip market.

Under the agreement, Ericsson, the market leader in telecommunications network gear, and STMicroelectronics, a chip maker, will take back most of the employees they contributed to ST-Ericsson, a Geneva-based venture created in February 2009 that had produced chips and modems for smartphones.

The decision to unwind ST-Ericsson, which came after the companies had failed to find a buyer for the unit, brings a measure of finality to a costly, unsuccessful effort to build a European semiconductor business to compete with United States and Asian market leaders.

ST-Ericsson tried to commercialize the smartphone chip and software technology developed by its European corporate owners. But the venture stumbled when two of its biggest customers, Nokia and SonyEricsson, had troubles of their own in the smartphone segment, which reduced and eventually eliminated the need for ST-Ericsson parts.

“The main reason this venture was never successful was because it was too dependent on Nokia and SonyEricsson,” said Lena Osterberg, an analyst at Carnegie Investment Bank in Stockholm. “Both handset makers were negatively affected by the market shift to Apple and Samsung, and that had consequences for ST-Ericsson.”

Ericsson’s chief executive, Hans Vestberg, acknowledged Monday that the venture had been hobbled by the difficulties at Nokia and SonyEricsson. The venture had originally been set up to create components for so-called feature phones, handsets that were the forerunner to today’s smartphones. But with the advent of the iPhone and other smartphones, the market for feature phone components basically dried up, Mr. Vestberg said.

“The whole market changed and suddenly the demand for feature phones vanished,” Mr. Vestberg said.

Ericsson, based in Stockholm, said it would re-employ 1,800 of ST-Ericsson’s 4,350 employees, with most workers returning from operations in Sweden, Germany, India and China. STMicroelectronics, which is based in Geneva, said it would assume responsibility for 950 ST-Ericsson employees, most of whom are working in France and Italy.

The 50-50 venture had generated about $2.8 billion in losses for Ericsson alone. In the fourth quarter of last year, ST-Ericsson generated an operating loss of 8.5 billion Swedish kronor, or $1.3 billion, for Ericsson, almost all of which resulted from an 8 billion kronor write-down.

ST-Ericsson said the fate of 1,600 employees not being repatriated by the two parent companies â€" roughly 37 percent of the venture’s work force â€" would depend on the outcome of a global work force review. As part of that review, ST-Ericsson said it was looking for a buyer for its business that develops handset components for Wi-Fi and other short-range connection technologies. That business employs about 200 people.

“ST-Ericsson will carry out restructuring of its current operations, which could impact some 1,600 employees worldwide,” the company said in a statement.

The jobs under review include 500 to 700 in Europe, of which 400 to 600 are in Sweden and 50 to 80 are in Germany, the company said. The rest are spread around the world, including in North America and Asia.

Ericsson said it expected to complete the unwinding of ST-Ericsson by the third quarter.

The Swedish gear maker said it would claim the ST-Ericsson business that makes thin, low-power smartphone modems for fast, Long Term Evolution mobile networks from the venture. STMicroelectronics will reclaim the other remaining ST-Ericsson products, Ericsson said, as well as some assembly and test facilities, which it did not further identify.

Shares of Ericsson were down 1.9 percent, at 83.5 kronor ($13.06), in Stockholm trading, while shares of STMicroelectronics rose 5.2 percent, to 6.19 euros ($8.09), in Paris.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 19, 2013, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Ericsson and Partner Will End a Chip Venture in Europe.