Can You Hear Me Now, Mr. Bremer?

[JewelDigger]

http://slate.msn.com/id/2088620/

<snip>

U.S. military officers and reconstruction workers, who have been toiling in postwar Iraq these past months, are complaining that a major cause of their troubles is that they've had neither the resources to do the job nor—literally—the ability to talk with those who do.

When they started work—initially in Kuwait, then in Baghdad after Saddam fell—they had no cellular phones, to talk either with each other or with anyone else. If Paul Bremer, the chief of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, wanted to know conditions at a hospital, a police station, a school, an oil field, a town down the road, he had to send a staff worker to go find out. Then the staff worker had to come back to the office to tell him. Needless to say, all this wasted time and energy; it drained morale; it choked attempts to establish credibility for the entire operation.

In mid-May, the Pentagon, without going through any of the normal bidding procedures, awarded a $45 million contract to WorldCom/MCI to build a cellular network. The award prompted much grumbling among industry insiders, since that company—besides having just settled the largest financial fraud case in American business—had no prior experience at building cellular networks. (For a while, MCI had resold AT&T wireless carriers within the United States, but it had recently dropped even that line.)

Not until July did the cellular network in Iraq start up, and it turned out to be less than occupation officials expected—or needed. According to officials who were there at the time, they could use the phones (which cost a staggering $4,000 a piece) to talk only among themselves. The network did not extend, or link, to Iraqi telephones.

<snip>

[chiburb]

1. Nice find...

Yep, we've gone from "no nation building" to "clueless nation building".
Another fine example of Bushco incompetence.

[gratuitous]

2. Incompetence?

WorldCom/MCI has turned a nice profit on this boondoggle. That's hardly "incompetent." Oh, you were talking about spending all that taxpayer money to build and maintain a communications system. Yeah, they were incompetent about that, you're right.