Condi Rice: Mubarak Should Have Listened To His People

In an op-ed piece for the Washington Post on Wednesday, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote that recently-resigned Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak should have stepped down years ago.

Rice, who served under President George W Bush from 2005 to 2009, said she thought Egypt appeared to be on the brink of change in 2005 following a speech she made in Cairo that preceded Mubarak’s reelection. However, Mubarak’s regime reverted to its old ways, imprisoning political opponents and continuing to govern through “emergency law.” Rice pointed to Mubarak’s eventual ousting last week as evidence that other rulers in the region should be on notice.

The former top U.S. diplomat also called on the U.S. and other nations to “express confidence in the future of a democratic Egypt.”

“What comes next is up to Egyptians. Many are young and full of revolutionary fervor. Democratic politics will be challenged by tenets of radical political Islam,” Rice wrote. “The next months, indeed years, are bound to be turbulent. Yet that turbulence is preferable to the false stability of autocracy, in which malignant forces find footing in the freedom gap that silences democratic voices.”

Click here to read the op-ed.