Hosni Mubarak, ex-despot of Egypt, died on February 25th, aged 91

BACK IN 1981, when assassins’ bullets felled Anwar Sadat at a military parade and propelled Hosni Mubarak to Egypt’s highest office, no one dreamed he would fill it for longer than his two predecessors put together. As Sadat’s vice-president, the former air-force commander had kept the low profile of a stolid, trusted retainer. This was not by accident. Mr Mubarak was a military man to the core. To his dying breath he held to the code of silent dutifulness that marks Egypt’s officer class, a praetorian guard that has run the most populous Arab state—with a brief interruption—since seizing power in 1952. In one of his last speeches as president, a week into the 2011 uprising that would soon end his rule, he vowed not to flee into exile as Tunisia’s dictator had done weeks earlier. “Egypt and I shall not be parted until I am buried in her soil,” he said. And so he shall be. Mr Mubarak died in Cairo on February 25th, aged 91.

Like many officers of his generation, Mr Mubarak owed to the armed forces his escape from the provincial working class, and shared their grudge against Egypt’s cosmopolitan elite. He was a squadron leader in the early 1960s, when Egypt’s then president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, sank the country in a ruinous effort to bolster the republican side in Yemen’s civil war. The distraction left Egypt ill-prepared for the six-day war of 1967, when Israeli raids destroyed most of its aircraft on the tarmac.