First, read this excellent Billmon post. This is my reply to his question:
Al Qaeda's Saudi branch (or should I say home office?) has already proven its "bang men" are very good indeed. And while I'm sure every effort has been made to eliminate as many vulnerabilities as possible, it's hard to believe the kingdom's oil infrastructure has been spared because Al Qaeda doesn't have the means to attack it.
Knocking Saudi Arabia out of the oil producing business for two years would bring the global economy to its knees - and probably bring about the fall of the House of Saud. In other words, it would be an enormous victory for Al Qaeda, the kind that would make the current fiasco in Iraq look like a paper cut. And there's not much the United States could do about it, even if it invaded and occupied the Saudi oil fields. Iraq has already demonstrated the futility of trying to guard something as inherently vulnerable and sprawling as an oil infrastructure against a determined saboteur movement.
So why is Al Qaeda still fooling around with these attacks on foreign workers? Is it because they don't want to alienate Saudi popular opinion by destroying the goose that lays the petroleum eggs? Are they hoping to inherit the oil infrastructure intact once they take power? Do they have a implicit deal with the royal family (or some faction within it) to limit their attacks to the infidel devils and leave the valuable stuff alone?
There are several points to keep in mind about The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia when analyzing the attacks there.
Don't think of the "royal" family as monolithic. The "royal" family is deeply divided between the hard line wahhabists and "moderates" who actually (or pretend to) contemplate "reform" like Abdullah. Don't underestimate the hatred the hard-liners bear for the infidels (that would be people like us.) Alot of flack was thrown up after the last attack on a compound which obscured the fact that the muttawa had had that compound under surveillance because there were things going on there that were insulting to their view of Islam, like coffee shops where men and women mixed. Men and women mixing in public is illegal in KSA and they overlook it in some of the Western compounds where the infidels don't know any better, but in the last one, Muslims were participating in this loose behavior. That's why they were legitimate targets.
There are factions in the "royal" family that could out-Osama Osama. If a popular election were held in KSA today, Osama bin Laden would be elected as President. In other words, the views of the hard-line clerics are reflected in a substantial part of the population. People in favor of "reform" are in the minority and persecuted. CP Abdullah pays lip service to reform because the Americans insist he do so. There's no real evidence that anything he has actually done has advanced any reforms.
The Religious Policeman is a blog from KSA and in my opinion he strikes just the right notes of cynicism on the "royal family."
If you read the Religious Policeman's blog you will encounter many references to the Saudi practice of having third world nationals do all their menial work. Saudis do not work. This is funny, unfortunately it is also very true:
That's the clincher. They must be Saudis. How do I know?
1) They used a Third World National to do all their physical labour.
2) They haven't paid him yet.
(Perhaps I should explain. We man our factories with Third World Nationals. And when we have a bit of a cash-flow issue, we stop paying them. Sometimes for months. They're caught between a rock and a hard place. Funds running out, but they can't afford to go home, and if they did would lose the remote chance of back-pay. But that's another story.)
No one really knows the true figures on Saudi employment, but almost all the jobs Saudi nationals hold are cushy government jobs and the money for those comes almost exclusively from oil money. Now, who runs the oil business? Westerners do, that's who. So, here's the Saudi dilemma. Westerners and their giant oil companies are necessary to KSA's welfare state, BUT the wahabbi hardline clerics whose muttawa run the lives of ordinary Saudis and whose imams and mosques deliver fiery anti-western messages to the faithful are devoted to driving the westerners out. This clerical faction is aligned with a faction of the "royal" family. Unfortunately, while the average Saudi may have a very good education in Islam and Koran memorization, he has no technical skills. So who will run the oil business if the westerners leave? No one will in the short term. Maybe the Saudis will eventually get some of the presently nonexistent work force up to speed, but there would be a period of chaos first.
That's why there is no need to destroy oil infrastructure. The correct attack on the "moderate" and Western-aligned Saudi royals is to wipe out the western underpinning propping up their money machine. It's a two-fer for the wahhabists, getting rid of infidels while also destabilizing the faction of the royal family that they despise. Think of it this way - what the wahabbists in KSA are doing parallels what the insurgents in Iraq are doing (you can even think of KSA's problem being an American occupation by proxy-the proxy being CP Abdullah and other US/Western co-opted and dependent members of the royal family) with a couple of exceptions. There are Iraqis who are educated and skilled who can run the oil business. In KSA, decades of being on the dole have resulted in a population with no skills and no work ethic. The Iraqis can afford to blow up their oil infrastructure, which needs replacing after the years of sanction degradation anyway. The Saudis need to preserve their infrastructure because they won't be able to replace it anytime soon, without letting western infidels back in the country.
