"This is the Arab world's Berlin moment"

The title is a brilliant comment by Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle Eastern politics and international relations at the London School of Economics.

Egypt deserves a change - as well as so many other countries in the Middle East. The only real democracies anywhere in the Middle East are Israel, Turkey and Iraq. And the latter two are still very flawed democracies, for different reasons.

Unlike in Syria or Iran, the problem isn't so much that the leadership in Egypt is necessarily malevolent. When I was in the Captain's career course (a military school I had to complete), we had a few Egyptian officers with us (it's normal to have a few international officers in each class). One of them works in the Egyptian equivalent of the Secret Service and worked in Mubarak's security detail. He knew the man personally and would talk about him. Mubarak was a protege of Anwar Sadat, the father of modern Egypt, and the first to make peace with Israel. Mubarak has also been very supportive of the Middle East peace process, not to mention a strong ally of the United States.

That said, he needs to go. Not just Mubarak himself (who is now 82), but his entire government. His party. The whole system. It has simply been in place too long, and very subject to systemic corruption, no matter how culpable Mubarak is personally.

Not that any of this will drastically improve the situation in Egypt. The main problem is that it simply has too many people. The population of this arid country is 80 million. Compare that with an arid US state like New Mexico (with one-third the area), which has only 2 million living in it. And that is a real problem. The Nile was quite fertile when there were less than a million people living there, farming on its banks, waiting for it to flood twice a year. The equation is very different at 80 million, and its very hard to escape poverty in that situation, no matter how democratic your government is. For Egypt to pull itself out of third-world status and become a great power again it would take a severe cultural change and realignment of its education system. Everything else would follow after that. A new President would be helpful, but he can't do it all alone.