In august 15th, 1971, Nixon ended the convertability of the USD to gold. at the same time, Nixon and Kissinger made agreements with the Saudis and OPEP in general. in contrast to the rest of third world producers of raw materials, they could control the price of their resource, as long as they sold it in USD.
Aside from your (excellent) other points, this is one of the key turning points in recent history that's often overlooked.
It didn't just lead to the Oil Crisis - which was an obvious economic disaster, and a direct contrast to the relative prosperity of the previous decade. It also seeded two narratives that have dominated the landscape since then - one being Islamicism, and the other the threat of inflation.
The fact that the Saudi sheiks aren't particularly Islamic, and that the inflation created by the oil crisis and related financial changes was only notionally related to worker efforts to increase wages, has largely been forgotten.
Instead we have these two folk tales - aggressive Islamicist bad people, and aggressive working class bad people who aren't prepared to 'reform' or be 'flexible' - that have become foundational talking points among the elites.
They're both nonsense of course. But Tricky Dick enabled both of them.
What someone like Joerg clearly doesn't get is that not only are the narratives self-serving nonsense, they're also disconnected from the really important issues.
DoDo put together an excellent list of more important things elsewhere in this thread. As far as I'm concerned 'slaying the dragon' means giving up on fairy stories and tackling those much more important problems head on.
The best way to do this is to change the narrative. At this point climate change and energy sustainability are a much bigger threat to 'our way of life' than scary brown mad beumbers are.
We should be dealing with those problems directly, and not wasting time blowing shit up in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because the reality is that neither of them are even slightly important in the longer term.
If you want to worry about a clash of civilisations, consider how much of a civilisation you're going to have left when almost no one can afford to run a car or heat their home, and most of the big cities are underwater.
Notice that there is a blind spot on the general discussion of modern fundamentalism which should be addressed. there is christian fundamentalism in the US which has some important similarities with Islamic fundamentalism, namely the subordination of women to their husbands, such as their acceptance of aggressive sexuality - better known as abuse. See Manuel Castells' masterpiece "The Information age: economy, society and culture"; Volume 2 - "The Power of Identity". (main meme: the network society); can't remember the chapter.
Sorry for the delay in noticing your comment. my reply comes too late, I guess.
