‘I ask myself why’

Juan Cole, who will be my guest on Virtually Speaking Susie tonight, writes:

I ask myself why.

Why would authorities in a European county like Switzerland entertain the idea of trying George W. Bush for torture if he came to give a talk in that country;

But, European countries are supporting Omar Suleiman for interim president of Egypt, even though he was the one who undertook the torture for Bush? Suleiman tossed some 30,000 suspected Muslim fundamentalists in prison, and accepted from the US CIA kidnapped suspected militants, whom he had tortured. Some were innocent. One, Sheikh Libi, was tortured into falsely confessing that Saddam Hussein was training al-Qaeda operatives, an allegation that straight into Colin Powell’s speech to the UN justifying the Iraq War.

I ask myself why.

If Frank Wisner, President Obama’s informal envoy to Egypt, is a paid lobbyist for Egypt and says things like that Mubarak must stay, which Obama then has to deny …

Why didn’t Obama send an envoy from Human Rights Watch instead?

I ask myself why

If Bush and the Neocons installed a pathbreaking democracy in iraq . . .

– Why does its prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, have to pledge not to run for office again (taking a leaf from the books of the rulers of Yemen and Egypt? Why does al-Maliki have secret prisons where people appear to have been tortured? Why is he taking over independent commissions such as the electoral commission?

I ask myself why.

If President Hosni Mubarak, his generals, and the ruling National Democratic Party have engaged in voter fraud and corruption during each of the elections for the past few decades;

… Would would make them honest brokers in moving the county to presidential elections in September?

I ask myself why.

If the Mubarak regime has had a change of heart and will now move toward democracy;

why is its secret police snooping through Facebook accounts with an eye to making arrests? And, where is Wael Ghonim?, the Google exec who began the Facebook page for the Jan. 25 demonstrations?

I ask myself why.

If the resignations of high Egyptian officials, and reputedly even Mubarak himself, from the National Democratic Party are sincere;

Then why not just resign from the presidency, since the point of being in the ruling party was to attempt to use it to come to power?

I ask myself why.

If the Muslim Brotherhood is supposed to be such a radical party

Then why is it a) the first major opposition party to begin negotiations with the government; and b) why is the MB rebuking Iran’s ruling ayatollah Ali Khamenei for saying the street revolution is Islamic, insisting instead that it is national?