Clashes between protesters and government supporters intensified Thursday in central Cairo and began to spread around the city. Meanwhile, the government claimed foreigners were partly to blame for more than a week of demonstrations demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, the country's ruler for nearly three decades. 

The ongoing turmoil raises numerous questions about what really is happening now and where it will lead. Here are some answers:

The turmoil in Egypt is intensifying and the outcome of the increasingly bloody demonstrations remains unclear. Anti-government protesters and pro-government supporters are clashing in the streets of Cairo, and the Egyptian military is ordering everybody to go home. Meanwhile, the United States is condemning the violence and urging President Hosni Mubarak to move faster in loosening his 30-year grip on the country.

The strife in Egypt inevitably will have an impact on the United States. Here is a look at what Americans might expect:

If there is any silver-lining from the inevitable fall of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, it should be that so many of the so-called rules governing Western thinking about the Middle East can be jettisoned as well.

1. Let's be quite clear: If the military opens fire in the streets of Cairo, as militaries sometimes do when dictators feel the wheels coming off - consider Hafez al-Assad killing 20,000 Syrians in Hama, in 1982, or Saddam's 1988 Halabja massacre, or Mubarak's own three week siege of Cairo's Imbaba district, in 1992 - their deaths will have been financed by U.S. tax dollars.