Since a lot of people were drawing the same conclusions I was about the Sarkozy cancellation, the Egyptian media is scrambling the defenses, and Husni Mubarak met with Mahmoud ‘Abbas today. In fact, though I missed it, he met with Yemen's ‘Ali ‘Abdullah Salih yesterday. Thus, to steal Marc Lynch's line from recent weeks, they continue to show that he is still very, very, very not sick.He does look a bit thin in the picture, but he's at least not white haired like Abu Mazen, who's seven years his junior.
Now I could be cynical — in fact I will be — and note that meeting Arab heads of state, where everybody's got a common interest in keeping secrets, doesn't give as much away, while meeting with Western heads of state means the West gets a better chance to appreciate the situation. If he met Sarkozy I'm sure the DGSE would do everything they could to evaluate his health, and pass that on to other Western intelligence services.
Bashar al-Asad is supposed to meet with him sometime soon. I'm sure he'll have a number of meetings, but it's still a case of keeping it within the family as it were. Why the Sarkozy cancellation, though? Are these Potemkin summits rather than real? Or are we all just being paranoid because, well, the secrecy seems more heavily laid on this time?
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