I watched "Winter in Baghdad" as part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. It is a life-altering film. It has been three years after the American invasion of Iraq and this film festival has allowed me to see for the first time the war from the perspective of the Iraqis. This film along with Iraq in Fragments has done into the nitty-gritty detail of daily life in Baghdad and other regions of Iraq. We are so far-removed from the reality of this war and what it has wrought and the media has been keeping that reality from us. We have a moral obligation to know what our tax-dollars, guns, and lives of our soldiers are paying for. After watching these films there was no longer any doubt in my mind as to whether or not we have brought progress and democratization to these people. You have but to go to the hospitals and see all the wounded children, see the rising calls to insurgency, the growing factionalism, the total lack of basic security on the streets and ask yourself, is this what Democracy looks like? It's enough to make me want to put on a sack-cloth and go out into the desert to atone for my nation. All else is insignificant in the face of such suffering.