Time & Perspective Quote by Anthony Weiner

Weiner’s line is a politician’s tightrope act, and you can hear the balancing pole creak. He opens by affirming a hard geopolitical fact - Mubarak as “a partner with Israel” - because that’s the credential he needs in a U.S. discourse where Middle East stability is often translated into Israel’s security. The phrase “There’s no doubt” is doing defensive work: it preempts bad-faith readings and signals to allies, donors, and cautious voters that he’s not drifting into romanticism about revolution.

Then he pivots, and the pivot is the point. “But there’s also no doubt about something else” sets up a moral inevitability argument: whatever Washington valued in Mubarak, the regime was rotting from the inside. The repetition of certainty reads less like confidence than like rhetorical triage, an attempt to staple together two truths that are usually framed as mutually exclusive: strategic partnership and domestic failure.

The subtext is a warning about the limits of transactional authoritarianism. By emphasizing that conditions were “getting worse and worse,” Weiner aligns himself with a post-2011 realism: you can rent stability for a while, but you can’t indefinitely outsource legitimacy. “Almost just a matter of time” quietly removes agency from outside actors - including the U.S. - as if the uprising were weather rather than politics. That’s a self-protective framing, too: it suggests the eruption wasn’t a policy miscalculation, just history arriving on schedule. In the context of the Arab Spring, it’s a bid to look both responsible and humane without fully indicting the system that propped Mubarak up.