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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's sleepy summer-time visit to Washington is purposefully timed. He wants to avoid Congressional scrutiny of his government's human rights abuses, the anti-Semitic Egyptian publishing industry, Egypt's massive military build-up, and its very mixed record in regional peacemaking.

Mubarak visited Washington last in 2003 and in 1998 before that. Prior to the 1998 visit, at a time of great Egyptian-Israeli tensions, I wrote a in a column in The Jerusalem Post that Congress should "make Mubarak sweat," which infuriated the Egyptians. Al Ahram in Cairo even reprinted the full column in Arabic on their front page to demonstrate how much, in their words, "Israelis hate Egypt."

Egypt is, of course, too large and important a country to...