Very intersting, humanitarian. I am with you in that it doesn't explain everything. In fact, no one theory does. There are several answers to be found to questions like these and these answers are all over the place like you pointed. About the clash of civilizations, I quite liked that book not because he carved the world into civilizations and implied a power struggle between cultures, which I think has some merit to it, but because to me the book ends up proving that people across the world are capable of challening the current powers and there is a good chance, by Huntington's own admisssion, that these challenging powers could someday prevail over the existing ones.