Yellow Elephant Math: Liberals Favor Overruning Iraq and Bankrupting America

I got a Chicken Hawk diatribe in one of my recent posts, and it led me to an interesting question, “What if every able bodied man and woman between the Ages of 18-42 who supported the Iraq War served?” The Left proclaims it is our patriotic duty to go and serve if we support it. So let’s do some simple math. I found a demographics site that breaks down US demographics by age from the 2000 census. Here are the figures for relevant brackets:

15-24: 39,183,891
25-34: 39,891,724
35-44: 45,148,527

Now, we’ve got to tweak this a little bit. Because 15 and 16 year olds can’t enlist, neither can 43 or 44 year olds. So, let’s go ahead and reduce those brackets by 20% and round to the nearest one:

17-24: 31,347,113
25-34: 39,891,724
35-42: 36,118,822

So we’ve got a total of people between 17 and 42 of approximately:

107,357,659

Now, of this total, let’s say 36% support the war as was the result of a recent poll:

38,648,757

Now, let’s assume that 60% of these are able bodied, leaving the following as the number of people that should join up and go to Iraq according to the left:

23,189,254

Now, 23.2 million ground troops might seem a tad excessive, considering that combined in the Pacific and European theaters in World War II, we used only 16 million soldiers. In addition, as there are only 28 million people in Iraq, we, and not the Shia, would be the new dominant group in the country.

In addition, what would be the cost of maintaining a force of 23.2 million in Iraq? According to Harpers, it’s costing $400,000 per soldier to keep US forces in the region with body armor, etc (before pay) so the total cost for Operation Yellow Elpehant:

$9,275,701,600,000 per year

So if all the “Chicken Hawks” wanted to go to Iraq, it would cost us $9.3 trillion per year to keep them there. The latest budget is $2.8 trillion dollars, so this would require either quadrupling the federal budget and raising taxes to about 100% (given that US Gross Domestic product is around $13 trillion) leaving Americans with nothing to eat, or taking on a HUGE deficit.

Being a supporter of America means understanding the type of war we’re in. Unlike World War II, we don’t require tens of millions of troops on the ground. In fact, were we to air drop 23 million soldiers into Iraq, I think the Iraqis might become more hostile. But, as I haven’t served in war, according to them, I’m unable to make that analsysis, so just call it a hunch.

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