that is all.

Uh, Courtney, would that be the Northern Ute tribe, the Southern Ute tribe, or the Ute Mountain Ute tribe that you're guest correspondent of/from/for? :-)

9/11 happened as my senior year in college kicked off, less than a year before I became an officer. My YG has spent their entire careers fighting these wars - while that's different from living half your life under the spectre, I can appreciate where she's coming from and agree with her for much the same reasons she states.

He'll be replaced - I don't think anything else could happen; we'll also keep fighting over there. While my reasons for believing these things are true are FAR different from Bacon's, he is right in that conclusion.

Much better than the usual drivel I read in the New York Times, for example. Why I continue to punish myself by reading that "newspaper" I'll never know. Probably habit more than anything else. Bill Safire is long dead. I should get that through my head.

But I like it!

Walt

I'm always mildly amused by the folks who talk about how since 9/11 half their lives have been spent with this threat over their heads. For thus of us who do this stuff for a living the threat has been hanging over us a whole lot longer. Munich anybody? Carlos the Jackal? The PLO? Entebbe? Khobar Towers? bin Laden declared war on us in 1998, but he was well known to the watchkeepers long before then. Islamic terrorism didn't suddenly pop on 9/11, that's just the day it finally got everyone's attention.

this just looks like arm-chair bad-assery to me. This may be an opportunity for many to celebrate overcoming a great pervading fear, but (since apparently individuals are in the business of speaking for 'us') I'll say this: if there's one thing we should have learned this past decade it's that we shouldn't have feared as much as we did. To reject that fear and the good guys vs. bad guys mentality to which to author refers is not moral relativism but a denial of moral absolutism and an embrace of the world's many shades of gray, shades which were ignored and led to many untimely deaths.

Fear of a hateful yet desperate and small enemy has cost us dearly. Celebrating so fervently just makes their threat seem so much bigger than it ever was. So while we are glad that OBL's existence is rightfully terminated and a page has been turned, coupling the celebrations with a sober remembrance of the last decade's lessons ain't so shameful either.

Having spent time around some great, curmudgeonly grey beards in the national security world who loved to complain about the kids these days, it warms my still under 40 heart to see this much talent in such a frightening young person. Rock on GSG!

AQ wasn't hanging over anybody's head except insofar as they were sold a bridge by the media and as they fell victim to their own frail psychology. To pose a hypothetical, I don't suppose her reaction to the announcement of a cure for heart disease would have reflected the fact that it is 17,600 times more likely than a terrorist attack to kill any given American?

On her point that "sometimes -- our enemies need killing," she's committing the Either/Or Fallacy. Bin Laden could have been killed without anybody dancing in the streets.

I am consistently amazed at the number of people who don't believe AQ or their ilk pose a serious threat - not just to us, but to those they purport to defend. If you truly believe that simply by packing up and going home, stopping all aide for Israel and swearing to never insult the Prophet that this will all go away... well... I'll just say your wrong. There will always be something.

There's this strange need among Americans to hate something about America at all times - like we can't do anything right. If we had killed OBL and no one had danced in the street, the narrative would be about us essentially comitting an act of war or something, but the same population upset about the "partying" that occured would simply find something else to be upset about.

Bin Laden needed to be dead and it needed to be by us. Frankly - the folks who are part of AQ and/or part of its support are looking for reasons to hate us. Had he died of old age, they'd have rejoiced at our impotence - the fact that the worlds most "powerful" country couldn't find him. Given the choice, and knowing a little about the culture, it's better to have appeared strong than weak.

Now - we can make the argument that it's time to come home and a strong case can be made for it. We can also discuss the merits of pressing the fight now while we have the initiative (or what initiative we have). These are good arguments to have. This is just silly - I mean, since when did we really start caring what people celebrate?

Kilgore - you're right, it didn't just appear on 9/11 and folks did know about this threat before then - but before 9/11 if you'd have said I was going to spend the first decade of my career at war in Iraq and Afghanistan - I think that's the point. Before this, the regular American had no idea that this threat existed and to be honest, I think that's a success on the part of people responsible for our security. The fact that most Americans have no idea what I do or what it's like out there, well I consider that a success too (although not on my part, but on the folks who went before me).

Iron Capt - right on.

To be honest, as someone in the same age group, I with Courtney that 9/11 was a truly pivotal moment in the lives of our generation. And of course 9/11 wasn't the first case of terrorism by any means, but the way it changed American politics was, for us, huge.

Most of us are too young to have clear memories or associations with the military actions of the 1990s - the first Gulf War, Somalia, the Balkans. Our perceptions and feelings about the U.S. military and intelligence capabilities have been shaped for the most part by 9/11 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Contrary to what Courtney claims, I don't think we celebrated OBL's death because it "validates what so many of us have learned in the past decade -- that America really is a magical nation." Rather, I think Bin Laden's death was so important to us because we have NOT seen our country as "magical" over the past decade. We want our country to succeed, but that has not been our experience. Our lives have been defined by the intelligence failure of 9/11 and the continued painful struggles in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya (not to mention the economy).

OBL's death marks the first real, concrete moment of victory we have seen our military and intelligence services achieve, after a decade of failures and partial successes. We celebrate his death because it proved us wrong about our country, not because it proved us right.

i was 16 on 9/11, and my school was close enough to DC that we were sent home early that day - i watched the towers fall in english class. i vividly remember people laughing and joking in the hallway when we were sent home...who cares about terrorism on our shores? we get an unscheduled half day!

fast forward ten years, and it seems that a number of the teens on twitter were blissfully unaware of OBL's existence until it came to a bloody end. as for those kids from GW partying in front of the white house...my guess is that they found the shuffling of OBL off this mortal coil to be a good excuse to party. although i guess it is possible that shouting the phrase "tits for freedom" means something other than what i think it means.

i'm starting to think rubber ducky has the right idea.

that said a bunch of what people like Courtney or myself have already said. Then I noticed Tom's play on words with this article's title vs. Courtney's name and realized that he was decidedly more clever than I could hope to be in an already redundant post.

Nevertheless, I agree with all of Courtney's major points despite (or because of?) her Cali Valley Girl prose. Justice - good, bad and ugly - was done to a (my) generation's most rightly feared personification of evil, and this represents not necessarily a beginning or an end, but certainly a turning point in things to come.

This is a nice piece by GSGF. For one, it was readable. I think Courtney toned-down her affected Valley Girl-cum-intermittent Francophone manner (or whatever it is) for the venerable Mr. Ricks.

Wanted to give readers a head's up on the reactions of other Millennials to the death of UBL. Diplomatic Courier asked a group from Young Professionals in Foreign Policy to similarly comment on what UBL's death means to them. (By and large, this group mostly witnessed 9/11 from their college dorm room TVs). You can read their reactions here: http://tinyurl.com/3jge6lb.

Enjoy.

Don't forget other contextual elements. If you're a milennial (as I am) you've seen two massive bubbles burst: .com and housing and a subsequent questioning of the American dream. This a generation born when the Challenger blew up and then saw the Columbia disaster. The foundering missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The wall had already come down - we were told history had ended.

The death of OBL was an event that demonstrated the potency of this country for a generation that had seen a lot of the opposite.

The kids outside the WH were even younger than GSGF: we were in fourth, fifth, and sixth grades when the towers went down.

Some of our peers mock us for celebrating death; some, like Courtney, see this as moment to define our faith in county. I'll tell you what it was for all of us: catharsis.

We've never (or almost never) flown on a plane without the modern TSA regime of restrictions. We've come of age during unending wars and a culture of fear. And the fact that the guy, the face behind that first attack, was finally gone?

That's why we partied outside the WH. Because regardless of all of the complicated intellectual aftermath of UBH's death, our emotions were set free.

I was not really replying directly to your statement - kind of a glancing blow. I tried to indicate that my not "replying" to your thread. I do believe it was a triumphant moment though...I do think people need to find a reason to be angry with the United States and if it isn't one thing, it's something else. It frustrates me. We aren't perfect, sazkove kancelare but this isn't a bad place to live either. You didn't say anything against this - that was just an observation I've made over the last several years and it was obvious again during the debate about the OBL killing.
I don't usually reply to the underlying premises in Bacon's statements. He's right that we should leave Iraq and Afghanistan sooner rather than later - but wrong in the idea that we should leave immediatly.