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Egypt's Sisyphean Struggle for Democracy
(Wall Street Journal) Fouad Ajami - In all likelihood, Egypt's new draft constitution, rushed through an Islamist-dominated assembly last month and facing a national referendum this Saturday and next, will be ratified. The protesters of Tahrir Square never thought their exertions would end in the ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood. When the Muslim Brotherhood's bullies accuse the demonstrators against Morsi of being agents of foreign embassies, they fall back on a page from the playbook of Hosni Mubarak. Our officials never caught on to the Egyptian dictator's double-game of aiding and abetting a culture of anti-Americanism and anti-modernism (and heavy doses of anti-Semitism) as he feigned to be our man on the banks of the Nile. The assertion of extraordinary powers by Morsi right after he had brokered a cease-fire between Israel and the warlords of Hamas was vintage Mubarak: moderation in foreign policy as an alibi for domestic repression. The writer is a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution.