CDMA vs. GSM in Post-war Iraq

An anonymous reader submits: "Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is pressing congress to favor CDMA over GSM for mobile phone service in U.S.-funded reconstruction plans. One reason for pushing this is that a CDMA system would benefit American companies, such as California-based Qualcomm, while GSM would favor European companies. Currently, GSM is the most widely used mobile standard in surrounding countries."

Comments

Uhhh

[Anonymous Coward]

There's already that sort of aid on the way, and Bush wants another 8 billion or so to be spent on that in the first 6 months. That's not counting other private group charities. They have to look at all these different issues as part of rebuilding. It's like saying we shouldn't bother fighting the common cold until we've got cancer taken care of.

Re:In other news

[Milican]

"He is still on Haliburton's payroll and still owns 8 million of Haliburton's stock options."

I'm sorry, but thats incorrect. The quote below with source proves it....

"Cheney divested himself of all interest in Halliburton, the largest U.S. oilfield services company, after the 2000 election." CNN Money

Hope that helps clear things up :)

JOhn

Re:This is a joke right?

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Seriously folks, in percentage of population, the US Military has already killed more Iraqi civilians than 9/11 killed Americans.

The obvious response to this is: so what? Percentage of the population? That's a pretty meaningless metric.

However, it's worth noting that you're actually correct... or may be, depending on how the numbers turn out.

September 11 killed about 3,000 Americans, out of a population of about 280 million. (All figures are rounded, of course, because I'm just too lazy to look them up for an argument as ridiculous as this one.) That's 0.0011%.

The Iraqi government claims that about 350 civilians have died during the war. Of course, they claim to have destroyed dozens of our tanks, too, so we know their claims are far from perfect. But let's go with the Iraqi number, just for kicks. There are about 25 million people in Iraq. That comes to 0.0014%. So by those numbers, you're right.

However, we only have confirmation of about 25 civilian deaths in Iraq. That's going to be too low, obviously, because we don't have confirmation of every single civilian death, but just to put a bracket around the numbers, that comes to exactly 0.0001%.

So whether or not there have been more Iraqi civilians killed as a percentage of total population than were killed on 9/11 remains to be seen; the percentages could be quite close, or they could be off by a factor of 10, depending on how the final math turns out.

But this is all just an exercise in arithmetic. It means nothing. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, so we're not there to exercise vengance. And if we were, we would still have a long way to go, because Iraq would still be 2,650 civilians short of the mark.

Let's not worry about what cell phones the Iraqis will use after we win, and worry instead about whether or not it's possible for us to win.

Nobody has the slightest doubt that we'll win. This has been, by some interpretations, the most successful military campaign in history, and that includes the ratio of civilians killed per ton of ordinance employed. In other words, this has been the most benign war in history so far, and yet we're still virtually unopposed. Our biggest concern right now, apart from avoiding civilian casualties, is harassment from irregulars behind our front lines. The biggest campaign of resistance the Iraqi forces can mount against us right now qualifies as a nuisance, and not even a significant nuisance.

There's no question that we're going to win.

Re:This is a joke right?

[Evil Adrian]

Actually, no, no it isn't.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A522 41-2002Dec29.html

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/88244_sean24 .shtml

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/publications/iraq gate/iraqgate.html

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2 003/03/02/IN123519.DTL

http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/01/17/iraq.chemical.su it/

Defend your viewpoint, ass!

War Body Count < Pre-War Body Count

[superyooser]

Why did they start the body count at 0 when the war began? Oh right, no Iraqi civilians were killed before the war. Our war has disrupted the peace that Iraqis were enjoying. Seriously, the only kind of "peace" the people of Iraq had was RIPping with the worms and maggots in the ground.

A group of American anti-war demonstrators who came to Iraq with Japanese human shield volunteers made it across the border today with 14 hours of uncensored video, all shot without Iraqi government minders present. Kenneth Joseph, a young American pastor with the Assyrian Church of the East, told UPI the trip "had shocked me back to reality." Some of the Iraqis he interviewed on camera "told me they would commit suicide if American bombing didn't start. They were willing to see their homes demolished to gain their freedom from Saddam's bloody tyranny. They convinced me that Saddam was a monster the likes of which the world had not seen since Stalin and Hitler. He and his sons are sick sadists. Their tales of slow torture and killing made me ill, such as people put in a huge shredder for plastic products, feet first so they could hear their screams as bodies got chewed up from foot to head."

We all knew that there would be civilian deaths in Iraq, but you should compare the ongoing war body count and post-war body count to the pre-war body count. Saddam Hussein is responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand people, or over a million by some estimates. He was killing hundreds of people every week. If only 200-300 were killed in a week of war, that's probably approximately maintaining the status quo -- the pre-war body count -- minus the torture. The post-war body count will be close to zero per week.