Hosni Mubarak's appointment Saturday of his intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, as vice president, was taken as a hopeful sign. The fact that the vice presidency had been left vacant for many years had been one of many signs that Mubarak had no plans to leave the scene. (Mubarak himself rose to the top job from the vice presidency, in 1981, upon the assassination of President Anwar Sadat.)

Mideast scholar Ryan LaHurd told me that Mubarak's transparent angling to set up his son, Gamal, to succeed him, may have been one of the factors that precipitated the demonstrations (even though the Gamal for heir stuff had been rumored for more than a year).

(LaHurd is a Lebanese-American whom I knew from his days at Augsburg, but who subsequently ran the New York-based Near East Foundation and now runs the Chicago-based J.S. Kemper Foundation.)

In fact, some analysts took the Suleiman appointment as a gesture by Mubarak not to the mobs in the street, but to his own military and others in his ruling clique that he was not going to insist on Gamal.

(In Yemen, which is also experiencing protests, President Ali Abdullah Saleh also felt it necessary to deny rumors that he was trying to set up his son as his successor.)

Anyway, back to Suleiman. One of the happier scenarios that's been sketched out in has Mubarak leaving, Suleiman announcing elections in six months, promising not to run, and order is restored. (See former U.S. diplomat Martin Indyk's version of the scenario.)

If that's the way it goes, and it does so peacefully with a real election, hooray.

Jane Mayer of the New Yorker notes that Suleiman has an excellent relations with U.S. military and intelligence agencies, but because of an arrangement that disgraces both nations:

"Since 1993 Suleiman has headed the feared Egyptian general intelligence service. In that capacity, he was the C.I.A.’s point man in Egypt for renditions—the covert program in which the C.I.A. snatched terror suspects from around the world and returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances.

As laid out in greater detail by Stephen Grey, in his book 'Ghost Plane,' beginning in the nineteen-nineties, Suleiman negotiated directly with top Agency officials. Every rendition was greenlighted at the highest levels of both the U.S. and Egyptian intelligence agencies. Edward S. Walker, Jr., a former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt, described Suleiman as 'very bright, very realistic,' adding that he was cognizant that there was a downside to 'some of the negative things that the Egyptians engaged in, of torture and so on. But he was not squeamish, by the way.'"

Technically, U.S. law required the C.I.A. to seek 'assurances' from Egypt that rendered suspects wouldn’t face torture. But under Suleiman’s reign at the intelligence service, such assurances were considered close to worthless. As Michael Scheuer, a former C.I.A. officer who helped set up the practice of rendition, later testified before Congress, even if such 'assurances' were written in indelible ink, 'they weren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.'