Militants hold 50 foreigners in Saudi-manager

Reuters ^ | 29 May 2004 17:34:21 GMT

[valkyrieanne]

The State Department has been warning Americans *for months* to leave the Magick Kingdom. From what I read, Americans stay because the Saudis pay them in US dollars 5X what they could make in the US, because the Saudis can't do squat on their own, without their foreign worker bees.

[valkyrieanne]

The Spice must flow... You'll have the oil provinces occupied by western military forces if Saudi Arabia doesn't handle this forcefully.

We can only hope. For that matter, we should take over the Saudi oil fields immediately. They're separated from Riyadh by hundreds of miles and desert. Isolating them would be no problem - all we'd have to do is threaten to cut off the pipelines that lead to Riyadh & the rest of the country.

[valkyrieanne]

It does make me wonder why there have been no attacks on the regime but all sorts of attacks both the citizenry and westerners. Just how eager is Al Qaeda & Co. to depose the royal family? We can't trust either side, that's for certain.

Al-Qaeda wants the royals deposed, probably executed, and the terrorists in control of the country (and of the oil fields.) Osamu Bin Laden had been a big push in the anti-royals faction for years, having gotten started protesting the US military bases set up on Saudi soil for Gulf War I.

[fourdeuce82d]

It might be a lot easier to stop oil production by targeting the oil workers rather than field facilities the way terrorist tactics work. One for one, there are more terrorists than oil engineers.

based on conversations with my dad, the production facilities are vulnerable to people with knowledge of the system- not necessarily engineers, but even bright techs.

The Saudis, believe it or not, have a lot of their own folks running ARAMCO. Maybe not efficently...but if you can keep the plant going without blowing it up, you probably have enough knowledge/skill to blow it up if you want to.

An out and out attack by a squad/platoon sized element unfamiliar with the layout/technology might not do that much damage, but an inside job by four or five guys who smuggled in a truck/car bomb or two or four, and placed them where they would do the most good (bad) could.

[bert]

I don't think the oil production is their target. They want to scare and force out the expats.

They want The Two Holy Mosques and must overthrow the ruling Royals. To do so, they must complete the driving away of foreigners.


the want a Koran based nation beholden only to Allah.

[hauerf]

"You'll see a vastly different result with these hostages than the 444 days we had to endure under President Carter regarding the 63 American hostages in Iran."

Assuming the situation is not already resolved as I write this, I guess you could start a pool based on hours rather than days.