the easiest way to take down House of Saud is to take out the physical infrastructure. i think it will happen at some point, in fact i don't think a regime change will happen absent this. taking out a big piece of the infrastructure is not a long-term problem for Saudi oil endowment--everything that's in the ground will stay in the ground. but above ground, there will be chaos. with 30,000 princes receiving monthly stipends of $25K and up, House of Saud cannot afford to be offline for 1 or 2 years.
i think al Qaeda will try to do this at some point, and they are probably emboldened by the Iraqi quagmire which means the US cannot properly occupy Saudi Arabia in the event of an infrastructure strike.
we can only speculate as to al Qaeda's motives at this point, but my guess is that they are working in phases. right now, it seems they are in the phase of scaring the living shit out of all Western expats living in SA. these people--and there are 30,000 Americans there according to WSJ, despite US gov't warnings to leave, uppped to an "order" today!!--are a key part of the intellectual infrastructure behind the physical infrastructure of petro-economics.
this might be how al Qaeda thinks: if you do a "mosquito bite" hit on oil pipelines, you take some production offline for a few days. also, you up the amount of "Off" used by Saudis. this makes the next hit harder and you have accomplished nothing substantial.
however, if you kill 20-30 Westerners in one go, a la this weekend, you scare the carp out of the 100,000 or so Western petro-expats still "in country". thus there is a "multiplier effect" to attacking Westerners in the Holy Land which is not obtained by attacking physical infrastructure. at the mosquito bite level, which is what this attack was, i think they do more damage by making all Western expats think about leaving.
so, call that Phase 1.
maybe Phase 2 is where they attempt to take out Ras Tanura Platform 4, or whatever. that is not a mosqito bite type of operation. that one hit does more "economic violence" than 9/11. it's a major hit that will probably happen in a separate phase.
all just my wild ass speculation. |
