One line disproof: There have been a grand total of zero terrorist attacks on the United States from Vietnam, easily the most destructive and wicked war the US has ever waged - if people whose kids are still being born with birth defects don't decide to fly planes into buildings, I think it is safe to say that something else is going on.

Again, this ignores the stated intentions and demands of Al Qaeda, to recreate the lost caliphate and enforce the most fanatical Islamic rule within it, a global Taliban style rule. It also ignores things like Al Qaeda's stated support for the genocide in East Timor or Darfur.

You left out some possibilities. Perhaps religion both makes a counttry weak (and thus vulnerable to imperialism) and leads to terrorism? Or perhaps weakness makes a country vulnerable to imperialists, and also vulnerable to religious extremism?

And the other flaw in this reasoning is that there are a whole lot of places that were formerly imperialist subjects or were treated as pawns during the Cold War. They're not all full of anti-Western terrorists now. Pretty much the only ones that are are the Islamic ones.