A Young Nation Triumphs as an Old Ruler Falls

No vulnerable dictatorship will survive this era.

  • By PEGGY NOONAN

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BY PEGGY NOONAN

So Hosni Mubarak is gone. He'd been finished since Jan. 25, when the Egyptian revolution began. That a broad uprising could spontaneously occur demonstrated that the government could be taken. That it continued and the military didn't clamp down guaranteed that it would be.

The story is primarily and obviously a political one: Pro-democracy forces rose up against dictatorship. But there were signs from the beginning that some very human parts of the story were going to have an impact on the outcome.

One is that Mr. Mubarak was not without supporters in Egypt, but they stayed home, patrolled their neighborhoods, ...

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