In the middle of that post there's a gap where I bring up "bin Laden's half-dozen or so grievances":

Of bin Laden's half-dozen or so grievances, I've said before that I see the more religiously extreme as bargaining chips. "Follow the money" applies equally to everybody--look for self-interest. We're talking about the Middle East here, the people who understand like the rest of us that energy is the root determinant of a society's wealth and success; that for a century energy has come from petroleum; they're sitting on a big part of the world's oil; and yet somehow it's all gone to create wealth and prosperity for other people. We burn their oil in our power plants to power the transmitters that beam images of Western prosperity into their homes (images which amusingly depict Americans profligately burning more oil to power our fancy cars and light our shining cities, and trading plastic gee-gaws made from petroleum); and they look away from the TV screens and see abject poverty. If you were in their shoes, wouldn't you be a little pissed-off too?

I explained why I discount the religious ones, and then described in general terms the way economic issues must look to Middle Easterners. But I never quite got around to closing the circle and explaining that it was the economic "planks" of bin Laden's "platform" that I consider the ones worth examining closely, on the general grounds of "follow the money" and the specific grounds of ME economics.

Not to mention the equally important grounds that economics is the one area where there might, possibly even if remotely so, be even an infinitesmally small sliver of the shakiest possible common ground on which it might, with suitable skepticism and paranoia, with great effort and forebearance, be slightly possible to work out a settlement to the problem. All the other putative issues are hopeless anyway--America won't convert to Islam, c'mon Osama, even you know that--so I think the high stakes justify the slightest flirtation with the almost-unthinkable notion of a peaceful way out.

(Did I wrap myself with sufficient layers of asbestos qualifications to escape the searing flames of the Right? I doubt it...)