Clash of Civilizations

I'm glad to read that other people were also horrified by Huntington- while he does bring up some interesting points that in the hands of a less U.S.-centric author might be relatively convincing, I was really put off by his consistant inability to hold the West accountable for anything. For example, when describing the crusades, Huntington makes it sound as though it was somehow legitimate to invade another group's territory and slaughter them in the name of religion, an attitude that, if applied universally, would also justify things like September 11th (violence carried out in the name of religion) .
One of the major problems I had with Huntington's argument is his apparent lack of recognition that a lot of the conflicts between the "West" (for whom Huntington is a shameless apologist) and other civilizations stems from a long history of abuse and subjugation coupled with a continuing economic exploitation. Any group of people who were exploited for years and years, in the way that the colonized countries were, would harbor some resentment toward their oppresors. Economically and militarily speaking, the West still uses their superior power to their advantage, and in my opinion it is THIS (rather than religion or culture) that creates world conflict; Huntington acts as though the fact that the United States has military bases around the world and exercises an extraordinary amount of power over most other countries is irrelevant and that the conflict between the Muslim World and the West is merely one side disapproving of the other's religion. Apart from religious extremists (who exist on both sides) I happen to think that people don't particularly care what religion another civilization has as long as it isn't encroaching on their rights, autonomy, etc.
While Huntington's argument about civilizations defined by culture might make sense in explaining who is on what side, in my opinion this cultural difference in and of itself is not the source of the conflict. Rather, I would argue that it is much more likely that the struggle is over scarce resources (power, money, oil etc.) and that while perhaps people of the same culture fight for these things collectively, there is no evidence to suggest that if there were an unlimited amount of resources, the civilizations would have any cause to clash at all. I think this is a case of Huntington mistaking correlation (people with different cultures tending to fight with each other over resources) with causation (said conflicts occurring because of cultural differences).