Editor’s Note: Vishakha N. Desai is President and CEO of Asia Society, a global educational organization.

Sitting in Seoul’s fashionable "W" hotel last week, the last thing I expected to feel was a renewed sense of outrage about the Iraq war and what it has done to the reputation and prestige of my adopted country, the United States.  I had the honor of moderating a panel for the "World Women’s Forum 2008" that included Mia Farrow, Rory Kennedy and Yanar Mohammed, cofounder of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq.

Our conversation focused on women in conflict zones working for humanitarian efforts. While both Ms. Farrow and Ms. Kennedy were impressive, it was Yanar — much less well-known than the other two
ladies — who stole the show.

It was not so much her delivery as much as what she had to say about the plight of Iraqi women in the so-called "democratic" Iraq that truly broke our hearts. Trained as an architect, Yanar returned to Baghdad from Canada in 2003, precisely because she knew she was desperately needed there.

What she found was that the situation of women in Iraq had deteriorated since Saddam’s ouster. She said that under Saddam’s regime (as despicable as it was) Iraq had one of the most liberated societies in the Middle East with a high percentage of women going to college and becoming professionals; Yanar said her mother and women in that general milieu were expected to become doctors, engineers and parliamentarians with equal rights. Today almost 85 percent of young girls are practically illiterate.

Dressed in a Western-style outfit in Seoul, Yanar was in tears as she described how today, no Iraqi woman would dare walk out of her house without being covered head-to-toe or without carrying a gun! "How is it that the fall of a dictator and the arrival of ‘democracy’ could bring a worse fate for women in Iraq?" she asked.

It was equally upsetting to hear that TV channels are full of soap operas that show wife abuse, wife beating and other insults to women as idealized circumstances for the role of women. Women like Yanar and organizations like hers are not only seen as suspect but are routinely threatened. Yanar discussed phone calls that detailed how she would be kidnapped, tortured, and killed.

Mia, Rory and I, along with the audience of 700 women, primarily Korean, with a sprinkling of others, sat aghast listening to Yanar’s story and her experience.

Why is it that women’s lives are far worse in U.S.-occupied Iraq than under Saddam? Why is it that the new constitution of Iraq takes away the rights that women enjoyed before the occupation? Most importantly, why is it that we hear almost nothing about the plight of Iraqi women in the international or U.S. media?

Let us hope that when we finally leave Iraq, at least militarily, we will choose focusing  on the lives of women as one of our better-lasting legacies of this horrendous mistake.