Armed Liberal linked to some good articles yesterday. Global Guerillas and even the Christian Science Monitor have run a number of analysis pieces, noting that the recent attacks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia may be preliminary or "shaping" attacks for a more sustained assault on Saudi infrastructure.

As Terror's Next Target explained back in January 2004, there's a lot to recommend this view - and Gal Luft noted that the consequences could be immense:

"...About two-thirds of Saudi Arabia's crude oil is processed in a single enormous facility called Abqaiq, 25 miles inland from the Gulf of Bahrain. On the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia has just two primary oil export terminals: Ras Tanura - the world's largest offshore oil loading facility, through which a tenth of global oil supply flows daily - and Ras al-Ju'aymah. On the Red Sea, a terminal called Yanbu is connected to Abqaiq via the 750-mile East–West pipeline. A terrorist attack on each one of these hubs of the Saudi oil complex or a simultaneous attack on few of them is not a fictional scenario. A single terrorist cell hijacking an airplane in Kuwait or Dubai and crashing it into Abqaiq or Ras Tanura, could turn the complex into an inferno. This could take up to 50% of Saudi oil off the market for at least six months and with it most of the world’s spare capacity, sending oil prices through the ceiling. "Such an attack would be more economically damaging than a dirty nuclear bomb set off in midtown Manhattan or across from the White House in Lafayette Square," wrote former CIA Middle East field officer Robert Baer."

This is especially serious if the oil market is losing its shock absorbers - a critical economic role that the Saudis have traditionally played. Meanwhile, we know that Islamic radicalism retains a strong foothold in Saudi Arabia. We also know that it's hard to protect this kind of infrastructure.

So, why haven't these attacks happened yet?

Continue Reading "Oil Infrastructure: The Next Terror Target?"