Bear with me here for a moment.
Let's say you're the leader of a nation state with a major geopolitical dependency, security of which is not only highly desirable in terms of personal benefit to you and your supporters, but must, in all honesty, be achieved at some level for your nation's survival as a major world power. But there is an obstacle: attaining it requires significant control over a dangerous complex of political powers in a fractious region with a long history of bad actions by many of its most powerful political and economic factions.
More below. It may surprise you.
So you act. First, to establish a forward position in the region, keep it propped up and dependent on you, and then to undermine and capture the political and economic control of adjacent states which are the key to this agenda which is central to your survival. When covert efforts at creating and propping up puppet regimes on the political level and establishing intertwined economic interest through private investment/acquisition don't do the job, you take the next step, cobble up some pretenses and move into direct military action.
The above isn't theory. We've seen it many times, played out by colonial powers over the centuries. Not just oil--gold, timber, control of various trade routes, etc., have all fit into this model at one time or another.
But I'm not talking about the United States, in this case. I'm talking about the Arab world, which finds itself pincered between the world's thirst for oil and its own resulting inability to advance into modernity because the West keeps propping up medieval dictatorships in the region to ensure control over the oil. This is what has driven the rise of radical Islam: a growing anti-Western, anti-modern fury born of poverty, hopelessness and oppression on the part of Western-backed governments (in this, I include nations like the Soviet Union, a major prop for Syria over the years, as "Western").
The leadership of radical Islam, like Osama bin Laden, is faced with similar kinds of challenges to those which face the United States in pursuing its goal, which is to kick the West and particularly the United States out of the Arab world. The Arab world is filled with internal factionalized dischord and dominated by governments coopted and propped in power by Western governments. So, how to bring Arabs into alignment against their Western-backed governments and in support of these extremists' struggle? The only answer must be: use the West's oil dependency both as a lure to force them to act in a manner that makes it clear that they hate Arabs, and as a means of causing them to break their strength on the rock of a guerrilla war in a hostile region.
So when I think about the "flypaper theory", I think we're the flies.
I think that what has happened is that oil has become the sweet lure which has drawn the United States to become hopelessly mired, and is in the process of breaking the back of our economic and military power. This war, in the context of the rise of China and the ongoing acceleration of debt vs. savings in the US, has pounded the economic foundations of this country into sand. Our infrastructure is collapsing, our educational and research institutions are losing their lustre relative to other parts of the world, our workforce is unskilled, ignorant, demanding and indolent by similar comparison, and the weight of national debt is so high that we cannot dig ourselves out as oil supplies become more and more difficult and expensive to secure and defend.
Bush talks about invading Iran, but that's a joke. We are already extended as far as we can go, and we still cannot and will not succeed in Iraq. We should never have gone, which is obvious to anyone not stupid enough to have ever supported this fiasco, and the price will be the collapse of the US as a superpower. We will always have nukes, but our military is spent on this quagmire.
I think this was Bid Laden's plan all along. He is a highly educated man--sociopathic in his bloody zealotry, but not noticeably more so than the scions of the current administration, in my opinion.
Bin Laden knew he wasn't going to overthrow the US by killing a few thousand people in a visible way. But he knew our history, and our capacity for overreaction. He knew that what we would do in reaction would show our naked enmity to the entire Arab world and, by extension, to the billion followers of Islam. He knew our actions would radicalize many who were on the fence against the United States. Given his family connections, he probably knew enough about the personalities of George Bush and Dick Cheney that he could have predicted that they would go after Iraq at first opportunity. He can read the website of the Project for a New American Century as well as anyone else, and the signature list. He knew we would invade, he knew we would get stuck, just as we did in Vietnam, and he knew that no American president--ESPECIALLY this privileged chickenhawk--would allow himself to be humiliated by losing a war to a ragtag bunch of towelheads.
He also knew that we are a soft and entitled people who don't really have the stomach for a decade or more of watching body bags come home for no good reason, at vast expense. He has said as much in his tape broadsides, and he's right. Which hoists the American government on a nice spiky pike: an unpopular war that they can't quit, stirring internal strife and stark disagreement on how purposefully the unwinnable war should be prosecuted.
This administration will be remembered as the gang that broke America. It's possible that we were going to be broken anyway--all empires fall, and many indicators point to the 21st century belonging to Asia--but these ignorant thugs have radically accelerated the process. If the same level of investment had been applied to developing new energy sources and conservation, we'd be better suited to survive what is coming.
Instead, we're flopping around on the flypaper, dying every day. We will invest every last erg of our nation's capacity into trying to get off the flypaper, leaving none for the internal (metaphorically, metabolic) processes that would have allowed us to survive economically. And by the time we finally give up on this impossible enterprise--as we will, since we can't win--we will have created an implacable enemy which will demand that we invest far more of our dwindling resources in security measures than would have been required previously. Civil liberties will continue to erode in the face of the ongoing (but nonetheless politically exaggerated) threat.
I follow the thread back to what Osama is really trying to accomplish: the collapse of the United States, the "Great Satan". And it appears to me that he has brilliantly orchestrated a great leap forward of that exact outcome.