Hosni Sayyid Mubarak

Who is he: Hosni Mubarak was born on May 4th, 1928 and is a former Egyptian politician and military commander. He served as the fourth President of Egypt, from 1981 to 2011. The news was filled with coverage of his fall after 18 days of demonstrations during the 2011 Egyptian revolution when Mubarak and his family left the presidential palace in Cairo and relocated to Sharm el-Sheikh to his summer home near Israel.

Hosni Mubarak was ranked 20th on Parade magazine's 2009 World's Worst Dictators list. His personal net worth has been estimated somewhere in the range of $30 to $70 billion dollars. After the fall of the Mubarak regime, most of his wealth will end up in the coffers of the Anglo-American banking elites, which partnered with Mubarak in his reign of theft, instead of in the hands of the Egyptian people where it belongs.

Background: Hosni Mubarak originally joined the Egyptian Military Academy and received a degree in Military Sciences in 1949. Later, he joined the Air Force Academy and trained extensively in the Soviet Union, which was the major superpower ally of Egypt at that time.

In 1972, Mubarak rose in rank and to become Commander of the Air Force as well as the Deputy Minister of Defense. Later, he was promoted to Air Chief Marshall in recognition of his somewhat trumped up and exaggerated service during the October War with Israel in 1973, which Egypt lost.

In April 1975, Mubarak was appointed by Sadat as Vice President of the Egyptian republic. In this position, Mubarak loyally served Sadat's policies and, following the assassination of President Sadat in October 1981 by Arab extremists angry about his rapprochement with Israel, Mubarak became President. Hosni Mubarak's rule lasted for 29 years.

Mubarak was an avid member of the allied coalition in the First Gulf War and the Egyptian infantry were some of the first in the fighting to help US troops evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait. According to The Economist magazine, as much as $500,000 per soldier was paid or debt forgiven by the US for the efforts of Mubarak and Egypt.

The Economist noted: "The programme worked like a charm: a textbook case, says the IMF. In fact, luck was on Hosni Mubarak's side; when the US was hunting for a military alliance to force Iraq out of Kuwait, Egypt's president joined without hesitation. After the war, his reward was that America, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, and Europe forgave Egypt around $14 billion of debt."

President Mubarak did oppose the 2003 Iraq War, arguing that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should have been resolved first. In addition, he warned that the war would cause "100 bin Ladens" and following the collapse of Saddam, the several years of guerilla war which continues today indicates that his forecast was correct, though way on the low side. However, money talked, as usual, and he did not advocate an immediate US withdrawal from Iraq.

Democracy and any representation by the people of Egypt was nonexistant during Hosni Mubarak's rule and state corruption ran rampant from the top to the bottom of Mubarak's political and economic system. Government salaries were extremely low and failed to keep up with inflation, which led to public employees stealing and engaging in kickbacks, graft and corruption far worse than in the United States or Europe. In addition, adopting the worst of regulatory democracy, Mubarak expanded bureaucratic regulations, registration requirements and other controls that further killed the weak economy and fed corruption.

Egyptian prisons became filled with activists without trials and illegal and hidden detention facilities used by the Mubarak regime, like the Bush/Cheney Administration, when necessary to skirt US laws against torture.

Poor Egypt. The nation and its people deserved better but such is the political and economic cycle and consequences of leaders selling out their nation, resources and citizens to the Anglo-American Axis. This has been the cycle of Egypt since the arrival of foreign powers.

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