You won't need one of those world phones on your next trip to Baghdad

As anyone who has desired the convenience of being able to use the same cellphone in the US and Europe has realised, the two sides of the Atlantic have replicated their non-uniform TV standards with non-uniform cellphone standards. Europe (and indeed most of the world) uses GSM, while North America uses a mix of standards including CDMA. Hence you need a "world phone" that can handle both standards if you want to use the same phone in both places. But thanks to the people who brought you Freedom Fries, you might be able to take your standard US CDMA phone on your next trip to Iraq. Today's WSJ informs us of the following key paragraph from a letter to Rummy from a California Republican House Representative:

"We have learned that planners at the Department of Defense and USAID are currently envisioning using federal appropriations to deploy a European-based wireless technology known as GSM ('Groupe Speciale Mobile' -- this standard was developed by the French) for this new Iraqi cellphone system," Mr. Issa wrote to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
. The "U.S. government will soon hand U.S. taxpayer dollars over to French, German, and other European cellphone equipment companies to build the new Iraqi cellphone system. This is not acceptable," he wrote. He plans to introduce legislation related to the matter on Thursday.

One consequence of his plan to force CDMA as the choice would be to make Iraq's new system incompatible with those of its neighbours. And that's before we start discussing which is intrinsically the best technology. Our understanding of this matter is that GSM is better, which is why P O'Neill gets his US cellphone service from T-Mobile i.e. the one with the Welsh bird in their ads (as Austin Powers would say). Anyway perhaps we can expand on this idea of forcing inferior standards on Iraq when the US rebuilds everything:let's make them use the NTSC TV standard, dump all current US TV's over there to be used by Iraqis, and subsidise an upgrade to digital TVs for everyone here from Iraqi oil money! And if you don't like that plan, you're objectively pro-Saddam.