Making Out Like Bandits

How rigged is the bidding process in Iraq to reward almost exclusively US companies with tens of billions of dollars of cash? Very, according to Iraq Revenue Watch. Time and again the bidding qualifications have been constructed to shut out non-US companies, and especially local Iraqi and Middle Eastern companies. Iraq’s mobile phone mess is a case in point. A Bahraini company was able to set up a high-volume cell phone network within days of the US occupation of Baghdad, but being GSM (and not Qualcomm’s CDMA) and local, the occupation regime hated it and ordered it closed.