Most Muslims don't want to live in some Taliban-style utopia, which is what bin Laden and allied groups are offering.

Why should Americans care about the Nazi back story in World War II? If you don't have the Nazi back story in World War II, World War II is simply not comprehensible.

If you don't understand what al Qaeda was trying to do on 9/11, if you don't have a sense of who Osama bin Laden is as a person, if you don't have a sense of what al Qaeda, the organization, was on 9/11, 9/11 appears to be more or less inexplicable.

Often it is important to listen to what people aren't saying.

The image we have of bin Laden in his final years in Abbottabad is of an aging man with a graying beard watching old footage of himself; just another suburban dad flipping though the channels with his remote.

I've interviewed multiple people who know bin Laden... who tend to have a universal picture of what he's like, which is: modest, retiring, unassuming, kind of thoughtful - lots of things that don't fit with a mass murderer, which he is as well.

Bin Laden's death is just a punctuation point on a set of problems they've had for a long time. I think the prognosis for al-Qaida and groups like it is really bad, and that's a good thing.