Batelco Okayed For Baghdad Bid
After going out and building a nice, working mobile phone network in Baghdad, the US forced the company to shut it down for committing the horrible sin of not having paid the US for the rights to build such a useful system. Then, because what’s the fun in taking over a country if you can’t let good infrastructure go to waste, the US told Batelco that they didn’t meet the arbitrary qualifications to build the official network. After some fairly loud complaints, the group that set up the rules has made a slight adjustment, so that Batelco can now bid on the right to operate their own network. How nice of them. This seems like a case study in the stupidity of bureaucracy. Sure, it makes sense to have some rules, but here’s a case where there’s a perfectly useful system sitting there waiting to be turned back on, and it’s been completely shut down due to bureaucracy.
