Parenting & Family Quote by Susan Sarandon

Sarandon’s line lands like a slammed door because it refuses the soothing abstractions that sell wars. “Before” is the trap she sets: not after the fact, not once the flags and funerals have done their emotional work, but now, while the decision is still reversible. The imagery is deliberately unglamorous and domestic - “our kids… body bags” - yanking foreign policy out of briefing rooms and into American living rooms. It’s also a quiet indictment of how war propaganda recruits the language of duty to pre-empt doubt.

The pivot to “women and children” is strategic. She’s widening the moral circle past U.S. troops without surrendering the audience she’s addressing. It says: even if you can’t picture Baghdad as anything but a headline, you know what a child is. The rhetorical question, “what did Iraq do to us?” punctures the post-9/11 mood that treated “somebody must pay” as an argument. She’s not asking for a full history seminar; she’s demanding the one piece of evidence that would make invasion self-defense rather than vengeance.

Context matters: this is pre-invasion skepticism in an era when dissent was framed as disloyalty and certainty was marketed as patriotism. As a celebrity, Sarandon leverages her platform to sound like the citizen many felt they weren’t allowed to be: blunt, morally impatient, and allergic to the euphemisms that turn killing into “policy.”