In the midst of the war against Iraq, U.S. congressman Darrell Issa kicked off a transatlantic dispute over mobile phone technology standards for Iraq. At the end of March, the Republican congressman from California introduced a legislation, in which he demanded the use of CDMA instead of GSM for the U.S.-financed building of a mobile phone network in Iraq. He sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, objecting to a proposal by the Department of Defence and USAID to use federal funds to build a communications system in post-war Iraq based on the European GSM standard.

The row over the mobile phone standard for Iraq was for the time being defused by the U.S. government’s preliminary decision in May not to award a major contract for rebuilding Iraq’s telecommunications networks under its $2.5 billion reconstruction programme. U.S. officials said they would leave it to the next Iraqi government to decide how to reconstruct the telecommunications system that has suffered under years of neglect and two U.S.-led wars. Less than 3 percent of Iraq’s population has access to a wired telephone line. On 16 May, Reuters reported that MCI won a contract to build a wireless phone network in Baghdad – based on GSM. Comment by Rob Conway: “We are very pleased by this.”