A very insightful report in the NY Times about disaffected youth in Egypt:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/world/middleeast/17youth.html
From The Atlantic magazine, the most revealing geopolitical account of the Middle East I’ve read. 
After Iraq: A report from the new Middle East—and a glimpse of its possible future by Jeffrey Goldberg
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/goldberg-mideast
Excerpts:
It was Winston Churchill who, in the aftermath of World War I, roped together three provinces of the defeated and dissolved Ottoman Empire, adopted the name Iraq, and bequeathed it to a luckless branch of the Hashemite tribe of west Arabia. Churchill would eventually call the forced inclusion of the Kurds in Iraq one of his worst mistakes—but by then, there was nothing he could do about it.
The Iraq War has begun to produce "wholesale change"—but "it won't be the one envisioned by the administration." An independent Kurdistan would be just the start… "It's not a question about how America wants the map to look; it's a question of how the map is going to look, whether we like it or not."
While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone—from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism—the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region's comprehensive failure isn't Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.
A senior Israeli security official, whispered, "He wants Jordan to be more democratic… Would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That's what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan."
"The PC way of looking at the 21st century is that non-state actors—al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, general chaos—have replaced states as the key players in the Middle East. But states are more resilient than that." He added that a newfound fear of instability might even buttress existing states.
While it would seem eminently vulnerable to the chaos, Jordan is, in fact, almost tranquil… in part because most of its people want quiet, even if that means forgoing all the features of Western democracy.
In the years since his Iraq project fell into disrepair, President Bush has acted like a realist while speaking like a utopian neoconservative. He has touted the virtues of democracy to the very people subjugated by pro-American dictators. The problem is that Iraq has already proven—and Iran continues to prove—that Americans cannot make Middle Easterners do what is in America's best interest.
"I fear that the surge has just provided a break for Sunnis and Shias to better position themselves for further conflict when American forces are drawn down. There's no indication yet that the Shias are prepared to share power or that the Sunnis are prepared to live as a minority under Shia majoritarian rule."
As it turns out, the technology has really matured:
