I'm going to have to drop out of this discussion because I am swamped, but I wanted to clarify a couple of things before I do. When I used the term "blowback" as shorthand to explain how U.S. foreign policy indirectly contributed to 9-11, I was referring to CIA support for the mujahidin in Afghanistan, nothing more. I agree, these guys are reprehensible anti-modernists, rooted largely in the landowning class (although to be pedantic I wouldn't call them "fascists"). And owing to the great twilight struggle of the Cold War, the U.S. state deparment and intelligence apparatus helped make them what they became in the 1980's. A secular, reformist regime in Afghanistan (which took over in a 1978 coup) might have had a fighting chance had the U.S. not provoked the Red Army to invade, which set off a chain reaction of events that brought into being the Taliban's ancestors.
In using the expression "blowback" I did _not_ mean to suggest that members of Al Qaeda necessarily do the deeds that they do b/c they care deeply about Palestinian desires for sovereignty, b/c they are morally disgusted by the effects of the UN-US embargo on the suffering Iraqi masses, and so on. I agree that if the U.S. successfully brokered an Oslo-plus Accord b/w Israel and Palestine today, or if the Iraqi embargo was ended today, various jihadist grouplets would still be plotting more terrorist attacks on "Western" symbols of imperial and economic power, property, and people. Maybe a pullot of U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, cutting off foreign aid to the Mubarak regime, and so on would do the trick, I really have no idea.
My overarching point is that Brzezinski, Bill Casey, and so on have a good deal to do with the flourishing of the muhajidin into a serious political force. I would not be so stupid as to declare that U.S. imperialism is directly responsible in umediated fashion for what happened on 9-11. To argue thus would be to indulge in a form of "ethnocentrism" (for lack of a better term) that the knee-jerk anti-imperialist left in the U.S. is often ironically guilty of. After all, class forces, political alignments, etc. in time/places like 1970's and 1980's Afghanistan were not the mere result of U.S./big power maneuvering. But I do think the U.S. role in aiding and abetting the likes of Bin Laden was important enought to warrant the use of the term "blowback". "Blowback" does not imply "just desserts".
John Gulick