You have taken a wide swip at quite a lot of history, and I think you are mostly wrong. To my mind it is more helpful to consider the history of the relations between Islam and the West than to castigate modern leaders too harshly. That history would predict jihad by any ascendant Islam. Rising prosperity creates rising expectations and resentments, and that probably explains our current world better than any other single factor. The income of the poorest has doubled in the last 30 years, and they only want more. In Iraq, btw, average personal income has gone from $10/mo when we invaded to $200/mo now. Talk about destabilizing! The biggest force for change is probqably the TV’s in all those homes bringin in the outside world to people who have been isolated. Not many of them will choose martyrdom over a Mustang.
You cannot measure stability in any remote country just by measuring its average personal income to a scale of Dollars, Euros, Rubles or any currency.
Leaders? let me laugh. These presidents, prime ministers and such are far away from being statesmen like Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Churchill and many others. They assume functions, essential functions on the checkerboard of states, but they are far away with their many blunders from that primordial function of statesmen and leaders.
Then if you talk about rising properties, just consider the ‘prosperity’ of the ‘guardians’ of the faith in Saudi Arabia compared to the large proportion of slums that westerners and kaffirs cannot even see, yet you can notice their proportion now by examining Google Earth. Even for me as a Christian, this kind of injustice in a moslem country is insulting. This is the base of Al Qaeda that is funded by billionnaires like Ben Laden.
As I wrote in another post, I visited Bagdad in 1988. It was heaven with silent yellowish livid faces, not a smile, compared to the hell that is now with its blood and tears...and that wiped out the 2000 years of Christian presence. Not toppling Saddam in 1991 was a grave mistake but not as grave as the situation that resulted from the 2003 war.