"The" Clash of Civilizations?

In 1993, Samuel Huntington claimed that, with the Cold War over, the main fault lines in he world would be between religious/racial blocs, or "civilizations." At the time, many people thought he was full of it. Now, people are saying that Huntington been proven right:

The last 15 years have not seen conflict along all the fault lines that Huntington predicted, but his theories are looking ever more prescient, especially "along the boundaries of the crescent shaped Islamic bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia," as he wrote in 1993.

This January, writing in The New York Times, [Huntington opponent Fouad] Ajami graciously admitted he had been wrong. "Those 19 young Arabs who struck America on 9/11 were to give Huntington more of history's compliance than he could ever have imagined." Ajami wrote that Huntington had understood the "youth bulge" that was " unsettling Muslim societies, and that young Arabs and Muslims were now the shock-troops of a new radicalism." Their rise had overwhelmed the order between Muslims and other peoples. "Islam had grown assertive and belligerent; the ideologies of Westernization that had dominated . . . had faded."

So, let me get this straight. Huntington predicts that civilizations will clash; two civilizations appear to clash; Huntington is proven right?

If you take a look at Huntington's chart of "civilizational conflicts," you'll notice that "Islam vs. the West" is only one of the many fault lines he predicts. According to Huntington, we should also be seeing clashes between Russia and Japan, Russia and Islam, India and China, China and the West, and India and the West. But read the news, and you find that Russia-Japan relations are (finally) thawing, Islamic jihadis have largely ignored Russia, India and China are sharing a wary rapprochement, China and the West have yet to clash, and India is set to conclude a landmark nuclear deal with the United States.

So Huntington predicts civilizational clashes and gets one out of six right. That's prescience?

A closer examination of Huntington's thesis will reveal that, rather than predicting the future, he's predicting the recent past. The Russo-Japanese conflict had its roots in their wars in 1905 1939, and 1945; India and China went to war in the 60s; Russia fought the mujahideen in Afghanistan; and India and America had suffered frosty relations during the Cold War. Since the end of the Cold War, all of these rivalries have lessened, not increased.

Only the Islam-West conflict has flared up. Even so, this was already history when Huntington wrote his essay in 1993. The intifadah, the Gulf War, the Beirut barracks bombing, the Lockerbie bombing, the Iran hostage crisis, and other West/Islam incidents had already happened.

So basically, Samuel Huntington wrote down a quick-and-dirty list of the different civilizations of the world, predicted that the ones who had recently had conflicts would continue to have conflicts, and then scores points when one or two out of all those conflicts actually continues. Gimme a break!