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Yahoo! News - Fear Enters the Pipeline of Saudi Oil Industry

Last weekend’s carnage by suspected Islamic militants in the nearby petrochemical hub of Khobar drove the price of oil to a new high and laid bare an uncomfortable truth: The world oil market depends heavily on a calm that seems to be vanishing in this volatile desert kingdom.

Many people here believe that after years of threats, a struggle aimed at wrecking Saudi Arabia’s storied oil industry has begun. The nature of the violence has morphed; suicide bombings at housing compounds in Riyadh gave way to two major shooting rampages at oil companies last month. Workers are no longer rattled or nervous — they are scared.

And we’re depending on Saudi Arabia to bail us out of this current “oil crises”. What’s wrong with this picture?

The conspiracy theorists are having a heyday between the Saudi’s and the Bush’s. But if there are anymore attacks on the pipeline, we can say goodbye to any kind of recovery. In trucking or any other part of the economy.

Same article -

Saudi officials scornfully dismiss the suggestion that terrorism could block the flow of oil. It’s one thing to blow up a housing compound or open fire at a lightly guarded firm, they say, but quite another to obliterate a facility that pumps, transports or loads oil. The latter, they insist, is virtually impossible.

I feel much better now.

If anybody should be able to judge the strength of the militants, it’s the Americans. U.S. troops are stationed in Saudi Arabia, and the two nations swap intelligence. These days, the message from the U.S. Embassy to expatriates has been blunt: Leave the country; trouble is coming.

Yeah, much better now.