Rand Simberg steals a base:

By the way, it would also be nice if [news that London’s bomb plotters were doctors] finally puts to bed the ongoing “progressive” myth that terrorism is caused by poverty and alienation, or by our foreign policy (the latest manifestation of this nonsense is the nutty notion that we are “creating terrorists in Iraq”).

First, to regard the suggestion that our foreign policy has been in the past and continues to be an important source of terrorism as anything other than obvious beyond serious dispute—let alone “nutty”—is just to announce that you’re hopelessly detached, not only from reality, but from anything tethered to something that’s adjacent to something that once had lunch with something tenuously connected to reality. This is long past being some kind of ideological shibboleth: It’s an elementary test of whether some tiny fragment of you gives a shit, at all, about transparent facts.

That said, this conflates two utterly distinct propositions. The first is that poverty spawns terrorism. Whether there’s something to this notion at the societal level, we’ve known for a long time that individual terrorists don’t tend to be drawn from the poorest sectors of society. Osama bin Laden, obviously, was born into massive wealth, and most of the 9/11 hijackers were well-educated. So there’s no new information here. But the proposed link between U.S. foreign policy and terrorism is not that our actions make people poorer. It’s that people resent our perceived meddling in their countries, whether or not they personally are harmed economically as a result. And, in fact, here’s what someone who knew one of the suspects said about him:

He was quiet this time, and I could tell from the way he talked about the situation in Iraq and the British and American policy there that he was unhappy. He felt it was causing more suffering.

Other reports suggest that at least some of the plotters began showing signs of radicalism only in the last few years. None of that is dispositive yet, certainly, and the hypothesis that foreign intervention promotes terrorist blowback doesn’t depend on whether these particular terrorists were so motivated. But these guys certainly wouldn’t be my first example if I were trying to refute that notion either.