The delusions of dictators are never more poignant—or more dangerous—than when they are in their death throes. To watch Hosni Mubarak today in his late-night speech in Cairo, as he used every means of rhetorical deflection to delay his inevitable end, was to watch a man so deluded, so deaf to the demands of history, that he was incapable of hearing an entire people screaming in his ear. And it is almost always that way: the dictator, coddled in his isolation, surrounded by satraps and servants, immersed in his own sense of essential-ness, is the last to know. The Finns used to talk of the president-for-life Urho Kekkonen beginning his speeches, “If I die…” The denial of the end is a denial of death. The dictator, even if he comes to pronounce himself “sick” of being one, as Mubarak did a few days ago, cannot conceive an alternative. Which is why the most important moment for a nascent democracy is not necessarily the fall of the autocrat or its first democratic election but its first eventless, democratic transition.

The danger of Mubarak’s murky speech, of course, is that the jubilant mood on the square which preceded it will turn sour and angry (it already has), and that Mubarak will order—excuse me, advise; he is just advising now—his armed minions back into the fray. There is the fear, in other words, of his barely concealed sense of indignity and rage clashing with the ferocious sense of disappointment and agitation of the pro-democracy demonstrators on Tahrir Square. If Mubarak had any sense of dispassionate vision, any sense that national peace was a greater priority than his own grandeur, then he would have resigned and handed all of his power over to the profoundly imperfect figure of Omar Suleiman—all with the notion of opening the way for elections in September. Without real political parties, with power and passion so diffuse, those elections will also be flawed. Every Egyptian seems to know that. What Mubarak, like so many dictators before him, could not accept was that his own exit from the scene is a prerequisite for civil peace and an unavoidable step necessary along a long road to democratic development. “If I die…” He cannot envision it.

The one note of Mubarak’s speech that should rattle the American conscience was his angry refusal to “accept or listen to any foreign interventions or dictations.” In a perverse sense, you can hardly blame him for his rage: the United States has relied on Mubarak’s friendship and torture cells with hardly a complaint until, say, January 24th. Read the reports from Human Rights Watch on torture. Read the recent accounts by journalists who were unlucky enough to be locked up in Egyptian cells and able to hear the cries of ordinary citizens being beaten and electrocuted in neighboring cells. The press is full of such accounts. We have known this all along, and yet President Obama, for all his enlightened words about democratic norms, held back funding of N.G.O.s in Egypt that Mubarak scorned. We didn’t want the trouble of angering him. And now we are talking about timetables. In fact, it’s time that the Administration was absolutely clear on our support for democratic aspirations, in Egypt and beyond.

The drama is far from over and its course is far from predictable. But there is no doubt of its revolutionary importance to the Middle East. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who was among the most prominent activists to spend time in Mubarak’s prisons, told me the other day that the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were proof that Arabs—particularly young Arabs—want no less than what other people want. They refuse powerlessness, they refuse kleptocracy, they demand the rule of law. “This is a revolution of the twenty-first century,” he told me. “It is a young person’s revolution, and we can only hope that it will not be stolen, somehow, by an older generation or a newer Mubarak. We have to hope this empowerment will transform the Arab world.”

Read Remnick’s Comment on Egypt, and read more from our coverage of the protests in Egypt and beyond.

Photograph: Presidenza della Repubblica.