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US Uneasily Adjusts to 'New Egypt'

US Ambassador Anne Patterson had it right about the perils of "popular democracy."
Anti-Mursi protesters cheer and hold up a poster depicting U.S. president Barack Obama with a beard at Tahrir square, where protesters gathered for a mass protest to support the army, in Cairo, July 26, 2013. Egypt's army is recasting the country's political drama, giving popular army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi the starring role in a change with echoes of the past that could undermine democracy in the Arab world. Picture taken July 26, 2013. REUTERS/Amr Abdallah Dalsh  (EGYPT - Tags: POLITICS CIVIL UNREST M

Revolutions rarely empower those who make them. So it has been throughout history, and so may it be in Egypt as well. Under the leadership of a reinvigorated military establishment, Egypt is embarking on a path at odds with the uncertain promise of its brittle democratic revolution.

The Barack Obama administration is awkwardly and uneasily making its peace with this new Egypt, where the deep state is pushing aggressively against the fragile veneer of civilian rule that it has put in place. Anne Patterson, US ambassador to Egypt, has unfairly become a lightening rod for virtually everyone in Egypt and many in Washington unsatisfied with Egypt’s sorry predicament. In the months before Washington decided that President Mohammed Morsi’s ouster was not a coup, Patterson was an unspoken and unapologetic advocate of what must have seemed at the time to be an unremarkable and indisputable set of self-evident truths taken from the Obama administration’s standard democratic playbook.

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