My personal reading time has been eaten up by more important stuff but I will give it a go soon.

I really enjoyed the Oslo lecture. The introduction brought you right into back in time and space, moving at the size of the couple. He gave excellent arguments why he tried hard to focus first on 'how it happened?' instead of jumping too quickly to the 'why?'. The complexity of the conflicting internal politics meshed with the play of personalities and the changable foreign relationships was well presented. No much monolithic* there but a great deal of chance. The powerful influence of such a big terror event was justly linked to 9/11 with surprisingly close relationships between both types of terrorists/freedom fighters.

All in all he is able to map out a wide net of paths and relationships in which extremely easily something or a combination of different events could have caused history to walk down a different path. Tracking back such a historical path makes one highly susceptible to look at a chain of events as the only de-velopment.

*I read a bit about reader responses to the Swiss initiative and it is just amazing how easily many fall into the same trap. You get highly voted stuff like how the wise Swiss voter upheld the true Swiss ideas and rightly told the EU off, as if the big majority (not to say all) Swiss voted that way. In fact it was a extremely close call, with a higher turnout in the 'Yes' cantons. A small difference in weather, an important Olympic race, an EU interview less and so forth could have easily changed the result.