Leave it to you, TB, to jump all over the items in a post which I felt was overall pretty much on the same page as your views (which in this case, are really not all that different from mine). If you will note the paragraph following my quoting the "critics of present efforts" it rhetorically balances that statement and leads into my main point, which is essentially identical to your position.

I agree, the effects of European colonialism on the MidEast, as well as current corporate maneuvers, were either a long time ago or highly exaggerated. After all, we don't fly airliners into their office buildings because they own a lot of property and stock here, or because they once besieged Vienna, or conquered Constantinople.

As far as the MidEast's wealth, unfortunately, it is not distributed very uniformly over there--geographically or demographically. No one can deny that the oil powers have been very stingy towards their Muslim brothers concerning sharing the oil bucks. But that's just the nature of capitalism, isn't it? "Keep your hands off of my pile, Jack." When we owned the wells the common folk didn't get much from us either.

Nonetheless, past geopolitical maneuvers and geographic accidents have very real consequences, and sometimes they manifest themselves in ways that no one can possibly anticipate, decades or even centuries later. Sometimes, they're even seized on unfairly as excuses to mask other agendas and to fuel self-indulgent orgies of victimization. But it's still part of the reality we, and they, have to deal with.