1991: "Liberate Kuwait" or Feed 33 Million People?

The US government announced that the 1991 effort to rescue Kuwait - a country smaller than New Hampshire - was a humanitarian operation to free the Kuwaiti people from oppression. Iraq's incursion into Kuwait had begun only a few months before US forces were mobilized into the region. Yet millions of South Africans were still being ruled under an apartheid regime that had been in place for decades.

The average cost of each air-related bomb and missile used during Operaton Desert Shield and Desert Storm was $11,903.24. Suppose it costs $3.50 to feed a hungry person for a day. Instead of dropping just one of those bombs or missiles, the government could have fed 3,400 hungry Americans for a day.

Now consider this: during the course of the Desert Shield and Desert Storm operations, the US expended more than 227,000 such bombs and missiles - at a total cost of $2.705 billion – enough to feed a group of hungry Americans roughly the size of the entire combined populations of North Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming, for a year.

The total number of hungry Americans, 33 milllion, is equivalent to the combined populations of Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Washington DC, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, and Kansas; and yet just the cost of the bombs and missiles used in Desert Shield and Desert Storm could have fed all of these people for more than three weeks.