Interesting you feel that way... The point i was trying to make was that oil or financial strength seems to have little to do with exploitation of humans and other resources. Colonialism for example. I feel its just the dark side of human civilization and comes from a sense of exceptionalism. The Americans and the colonialists before them just took great pains to varnish their actions with random moral arguments and exceptionalism. Many others didn't bother with the whitewashing.

One curious note is that only the gulf countries fuelled religious extremism with oil. Even then not all of them. None of the other major oil deposit holders like Norway or Russia did anything to further ideology. Political power may be. But not ideology.