Former U.S. Sen. Wyche Fowler, D-GA, was U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1996 to 2001, at the time of Osama bin Laden’s emergence on the world stage. Currently chairman of the Middle East Institute, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, Fowler had these thoughts on the terrorist’s death.
“My first reaction is one of immense relief that a murderer on this scale has been silenced now forever. The Americans ordered killed by him on 9/11, and before that in the bombings of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and before that the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, have also been brought some justice.
I think that Bin Laden has been what the poet Dylan Thomas called the ‘worm beneath the nail' of American and foreign military policy, preventing us from examining the larger strategic interest of the United States in the Middle East and South Asia because of our almost single-minded focus on terror and terrorism, and specifically Bin Laden.
Praise is due to President Bush and President Obama for the single-mindedness of their constant efforts that finally enabled him to be discovered and killed. Now that irritant has been removed, and I hope it will enable us to turn a new page in our relationship with Muslim countries in particular.
I think [Saudi Arabia’s] celebrations over this are like ours. You’ll recall that it was Osama Bin Laden who first called for the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy, which got his citizenship taken away and him expelled from the country. He declared war on Saudi Arabia many years before declaring war on us and our people. And I would not be surprised if there was a very large element of Saudi intelligence involved, in conjunction with American intelligence, that led to this discovery and this attack.
This is a matter of immense satisfaction. I go back to where I began, echoing the words of President Obama, that so many people with so much diligence, determination and fortitude were necessary, over so long a period, to finally succeed.
This is a tremendous blow to al-Qaida and all the would-be al Qaida followers, that their leader has been tracked down and killed. They’re not going to recover from that. It may still be a slow death. There very well may be attacks in retaliation for his death. It might not be next month, it may be six months from now. But we’ve proven to the world that we don’t give up, that no matter what these terrorists throw at us, we are determined to bring the rule of law and justice to those who would murder our people and attempt to do us harm anywhere in the world. I think this strength of resolve in America will be a lesson to our would-be enemies.
- As told to Tom Sabulis, tsabulis@ajc.com
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