Mubarak's health and successor are guessing games

Mubarak's health and successor are guessing games So goes a summer of speculation and chatter over the health of President Hosni Mubarak. The man who has ruled Egypt for nearly 30 years dominates the nation's consciousness like a patriarch in a novel written long ago. There are whispers and asides, but few really know how the president is faring or what is unfolding behind the palace gates.

It is the not knowing that wears on Egyptians, turning every sighting of Mubarak into a national parlor game over how he looks, speaks, walks and smiles. Israeli news reports say he's dying. Egypt's state-run newspapers say he's likely to seek reelection in 2011.

With no vice president orclear successor, these are anxious days along the Nile, and in Washington too.

Worries over Mubarak, a U.S. ally who has battled Islamic extremism and kept the peace with Israel, have risen and ebbed for years. The recent tension began in March when the president traveled to Germany and underwent gallbladder surgery and had a growth removed from his intestine. He did not appear in public for days, and it wasn't until the Egyptian stock market tumbled and the satirical Internet song "Mubarak Is Dead" surfaced that he was shown on right TV speaking to his doctors.