IN DEFENSE OF MUDDLING: The irreplaceable Jonathan Rauch describes why muddling through the Middle East crisis is the best policy for now:
There are moments that call for emergency action and a clear and unified government policy. The terrorist attack on America was such a moment. The current crisis in the Middle East is not. In the Middle East, now is the time for muddling through, extemporizing, and sowing a certain amount of constructive confusion. Now is the time to zig and zag. Now is the time, above all, not to be panicked by doomsayers.
He also outlines the problems that would be raised by introducing American "peacekeepers" on a large scale, which most advocates of that policy ignore:

The day American and other foreign forces landed in Palestine, any militant with a dime's worth of sense would know exactly what to do: Test the peacekeepers by attacking Israel with suicide bombers, rockets, mortars, or whatever works. Something like that, recall, happened in southern Lebanon in the early 1980s, when Palestinian militants exchanged blows with Israel over the heads of a United Nations peacekeeping force. (The U.N. force, by the way, is still there and has suffered 245 fatalities to date.)
If peacekeepers allowed Israel to respond militarily to strikes from Palestine, the war would be on again, this time with hapless peacekeepers diving for cover in the middle. On the other hand, if the peacekeepers restrained the Israelis, they would effectively shield the aggressors, as foreign forces ended up doing in Bosnia.
In any case, surely the only way to hold off an Israeli response would be for the peacekeepers to promise to hunt down the bombers themselves. If they kept that promise, they would turn the Israeli-Palestinian military conflict into an American-Palestinian military conflict -- an outcome that Osama bin Laden would dearly love. More likely, they would squabble about what to do, taking halfhearted measures and creating an endless "coalition crisis." The militants would love that, too. After a while, Israel would get fed up and roll its tanks to the border, causing a diplomatic or even military showdown between Israel and the peacekeepers. By this point, the militants would be beside themselves with glee.

Robert Kagan made similar arguments in a recent article.
I think that Rauch is on to something in his dismissal of the talk of "emergency." Much of the urgency, in my opinion, exists in the minds of those in the media, on the Israeli left, in the U.N. and State Department - who were looking forward to a once-in-a-lifetime peace settlement and are instead confronted with the prospect of returning to what passed for a quotidian situation in the region, of constant-but-manageable hostility with no imminent prospects of resolution. They are panicked over the death of hope. But hope for something which does not exist is mere fantasy, which is a poor basis for policy. And it blinds the "hopeful" to the real point, which is that the event which was most likely to stop the death spiral of the region was Ariel Sharon sending Israeli troops into the West Bank.