"Do you know what astounds me most about the world?" Napoleon asked in his later days. "It is the impotence of force to establish anything . . . In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind."
This time, in the suburbs of Cairo, the mind lost to the sword, to grenades and automatic rifles and the fleet precision of fanaticism making one of its abrupt, savagely familiar hits upon the world's hope for something better.
So one parade yielded to another. The one that ended in fatal chaos produced, four days later, a nervous, solemn pageant of much of...
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