Sean Penn, Kilroy's Still Here

And what of the shocking rise in leukemias and other cancers in Iraq due to depleted uranium exposure and of the thousands of unexploded ordinances, both, gifts of U.S. artillery. Will we remember the hundreds of thousands of children who suffered slow and agonizing deaths by diarrhea? These primarily attributed to the U.S.- led sanctions in Iraq, where bombing of water treatment plants and an embargo on chlorine continued to ravage predominantly young victims. We must reflect on the certainty with which we were sold a war on the basis of what we now so expertly call WMDs. We must reflect on the resentment of the world, invited in our positioning ourselves as their police. With Syria, Iran, and North Korea on media hit lists, we must reflect on the availability of funds for violent crusades in the absence of funding crusades for healing the very real suffering of our own people and others.

This is our money I speak of, not theirs. Ours. Our democracy. Our flag. (Lest we forget Enron) but, we see Exxon. We see Bechtel. We see Halliburton. We see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell, Rice, Perle, Ashcroft, Murdoch, many. We see no WMDs. We see dead young Americans. We see no WMDs. We see dead Iraqi civilians. We see no WMDs. We see chaos in the Baghdad streets. But no WMDs. We see the disappearance of a murderous Iraqi dictator, who relented his struggle and ran without the use of WMDs.

Sean Penn, Kilroy's Still Here

Published on Friday, May 30, 2003 as a full-page ad in the New York Times