It took twenty-one days from the start of the ground offensive in Iraq until the fall of Baghdad. Just twenty-one days.

This must have been quite a shock to the various kings in the region who looked at Iraq as the region's strongest military power and who remembered well the eight-year war between Iraq and Iran which claimed a million lives.

Those observers must have blinked with disbelief when they saw that the United States didn't cut and run, as was expected, when it soldiers were killed.

Those cunning despots must have looked at their calendars and gazed across the desert at the American troops in the invisible distance. I can see them counting off on their fingers the number of days it would take those same troops to reach them.

There must have been a moment of fear in some capitals, a moment of doubt in others, as they considered their survival. A powerful military threat over there, a simmering uprising over here.

That was the moment, the opening of the opportunity to pressure neighboring countries for democratic reform.

But like a city in the distance obscured by a dust storm, that opportunity just faded away.

"21 Days" serves as a memorial for those pivotal weeks that marked an astonishing break with past US foreign policy, ended all talk of a "Vietnam Syndrome"--an idea so central to the calculations of the political powers of the Middle East--and stirred up the wasp nest of militant Islam, fueled by the power of oil-money in oil's last decades.