Fasten your seat belts as today my own personal “Wayback machine” is taking us all the way back to March of 2003. At the time the Iraq war was still only two weeks old, and Republican law makers in the U.S. had their sights set on critically important decisions.
Specifically Congressman Darrell Issa was pushing for a specific cell phone standard to be used in Iraq during reconstruction of the country. Issa was pushing for the use of the CDMA standard, used at the time primarily in the U.S., versus the GSM standard which was primarily the international standard. Bear in mind that the war was still actively being fought at the time and there was no well-defined government in Iraq to discuss any such standards. I would imagine that, even if the government was in full operation, cell phone standards were a bit irrelevant when bombs were falling.
Twenty some years later and I’m still seeing this kind of ridiculous behaviour in the halls of power. A war is in progress and we are seeing rapid price inflation and instead of focusing on that we spend time fussing over remodelling of the White House and construction of new monuments with Trump’s name on them.
It is interesting to note that Iraq’s Provisional government after the invasion selected GSM. They did this because European and middle-eastern countries had all pretty much selected the same standard and they wanted to support cross-border roaming. It sounds to me like they made a logical choice despite the lobbying by American Congressmen. And all of that is largely irrelevant now as most of the world has switched to 4G LTE and 5G which are somewhat more well-reasoned international standards.
Darrell Issa is still a Congressman for the Republican party, but I have no idea whether he has become more rational. He is not seeking re-election in 2026 for the seat he holds in California. Maybe his replacement will focus a bit more on things like inflation and non-Congressionally approved wars, but I won’t be holding my breath.
The header image for this post was AI generated using ChatGPT