The Quartet on Middle East peace will meet on the sidelines of the Munich security conference tomorrow to discuss the current impasse facing the Palestinian-Israeli search for peace. Breaking this impasse will depend largely on whether the Quartet is prepared to take a qualitative shift in the way it does business.

The Middle East "peace process" is in serious trouble. After years of fruitless negotiations, Israel's occupation is still firmly entrenched, eroding what hope remains for establishing a sovereign Palestinian state and concluding a just and lasting peace based on the two-state solution. Recent efforts by the United States to revive stalled peace talks have been nothing short of disastrous.

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Nathan J. Brown: Not Even a Genie Could Have Seen This Coming

A member of the Islamist opposition once told me the following joke: A man was walking along the beach in Alexandria when he saw a lantern. He picked it up, rubbed it, and out popped a genie. "You have one wish!" the genie exclaimed. The man thought and replied "I love New York! Build me a bridge from my front door to the middle of New York City so I can go back and forth at my pleasure." 

The genie scowled: "Please give me a real wish that I can make come true."  The man was disappointed for only a brief moment before he said, "Before I die, I want to see a different president of Egypt." The genie thought for a minute and replied, "All right. Should I make the bridge one lane or two?"

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J. Scott Carpenter: This Revolution Isn't Over

Steven Brooke: Don't Fear the Muslim Brotherhood

It is commonplace for historians to compare revolutions to earthquakes, but the metaphor remains powerful. The Egyptian revolution is much like an earthquake: its epicenter may be Cairo, but its shockwaves have reached all the way to Washington. Since the first crowds began to appear in Tahrir Square, the Egyptian trembler has so shaken the U.S. that small but perceptible cracks have begun to appear in the foundations of America's Middle East policies -- and in the comity of opinion that has guided U.S. views of the region for 60 years. The changes were first evidenced last week, when policymakers, pundits and government officials made the rounds of the Sunday morning television news shows.

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared on CNN, interviewer Candy Crowley was blunt: which side is the U.S. on -- "Mubarak or the people in the streets?" she asked. Clinton laughed slightly, then rejected the question: "Well, there's another choice, it's the Egyptian people," she said. "We are on the side, as we have been for more than 30 years, of a democratic Egypt that provides both political and economic rights of its people, that respects the universal human rights of all Egyptians." Of course, Crowley knew (as we all knew) that if Clinton had been asked the same question just the week before, her answer would have been entirely different: that our friendship with Egypt is based on its peace treaty with Israel, its opposition to Iran and its hostility to political Islam.

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The wide-angle aerial view from television cameras trained down on Tahrir Square in central Cairo is unprecedented in the history of world revolutions. We all have a ring-side seat. The satellite feed has become part of the story; the video frame is itself a site of contestation. We have seen moving pictures of Germans mounting the Berlin Wall, shots of Saddam Hussein's statue being toppled, cell-phone images of upheaval in Iran in 2009, glimpses of recent events in Tunisia, and the occasional view of simultaneous street protests in Yemen's Tahrir Square. But never before have foreign television crews perched on balconies of high-rise buildings overlooking the center of the action given the world continuous real-time panopticon images of such momentous upheaval. 

But what television has brought to the world is only a partial reality. There is only Tahrir; the huge metropolitan expanse of Cairo and the families at home in neighborhoods are beyond the frame, oddly irrelevant. The participants in the revolution are the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, not the equal numbers standing unpicturesque guard by night to ensure the safety of neighborhoods. TV shows a mass, not a massive group of individuals. This televised reality has become hugely controversial.

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Egypt's protesters gather once again for 'Day of Departure'
Hundreds of thousands of protesters gather for another day in Tahrir Square in what's being termed as 'Day of Departure,' demanding that President Hosni Mubarak leave. Following Friday noon prayers, demonstrators entered their eleventh consecutive day of protests against the President -- who has said that he is ready to go, but not now. Demonstrators continue Egypt's unrest, despite the governments crackdown against journalists and human rights activists on Thursday. "The feel here is that today is the final day for Mubarak, it's time for him to go," activist Gigi Ibrahim told Al Jazeera from Tahrir Square. "This whole process has been about who is more determined and who is not willing to give up. And everyday [the protesters] get more and more determined." Indeed, President Mubarak seems determined to remain in office. In an interview with American ABC News station, Mubarak said he is "fed up" and wants to go after more than 60 years in public service, but that he fears the country will continue in its chaos if he leaves now. The President also said he was troubled by the outbreak of violence across the country. "I was very unhappy about yesterday," he said. "I do not want to see Egyptians fighting each other." 

• Egypt government supporters attack foreign journalists.
• Tens of thousands turn out for rival rallies in Yemen.
• U.S. intelligence on Arab unrest draws criticism.
• Analysts say Lebanese economy will weather the political storm.
• EU leaders urge dialogue in Egypt.

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Given the high degree of euphoria and romanticism in the coverage by both Western and Arab media of recent popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, it would be useful for everyone to take a few deep breaths and remind ourselves that revolutions often look very attractive in the beginning. Then they usually go through some really bad periods; the French reign of terror and the decade of political turmoil that followed, the crushing oppression of Soviet communism in Russia, and the unfinished misery of Iranians.

I would like to be optimistic, and there are some positive signs in Tunisia and Egypt. Both countries have strong traditions of national pride, histories of constitutionalism, cultural riches, and a middle class of educated men and women. So far, the armed forces in both countries have shown a degree of professionalism and discipline that have earned the respect of both popular forces and key civilian government institutions. Both have had respectable economic growth rates at a time of global economic distress. Regrettably, however, there are also major factors working against a happy outcome in the next several years.

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"Enough we say, the decision belongs to the people of the brotherly Egyptian and Tunisian nations... Turkey shares the grief of these nations as well as their hopes." So-declared a self-confident Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday in his prime-time speech on recent events in the Middle East that received broad coverage regionally. While commentators point to the protests and revolutions in the Arab world as being the most recent example of the crumbling vestiges of the Cold War, the more significant long-term global trend is strangely familiar to the Turks. Protests in Tunisia have already overthrown the rule of a 23 year-old regime and inspired a similar uprising in the form of Egypt's ongoing protest movement. Lebanon's continuing instability and threats of Tunisian-inspired revolutions in Yemen and even Jordan further add to the significance of the moment we are witnessing in the Arab world.

The unprecedented levels and inter-linkages of the protests against the traditional authoritarian regimes represented most starkly by President Mubarak, has brought the Middle East back to a period more reminiscent of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Arab nationalism than anything seen in recent memory.

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When the White House calls for President Husni Mubarak to resign now, we are not simply calling for a new president to take his place. Mubarak stepping down immediately means something very different than some might think it does. Rather than simply replacing the man on top, we are close to calling for something like regime change. That may be a good thing, and indeed, many of the demonstrators are clearly aiming for precisely that. But it is not clear that those who simply call for Mubarak to leave have thought through the details of what happens next.

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