Al Qaeda's futile attack on Saudi facility

NY Times:

A suicide bomb attack on Saudi Arabia's sprawling Abqaiq oil facility was thwarted Friday, when guards opened fire on two explosives-laden cars, causing them to detonate at a security gate about a mile from the main entrance, the Saudi Interior Ministry said.

In an Internet posting, Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attack, the first on Saudi Arabia's oil infrastructure. The assault ended a yearlong lull in violence in the kingdom.

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With its colossal size — the plant has a capacity of 13 million barrels a day — Abqaiq has long been recognized as an obvious target of terrorists, who may be attracted by the prospect of knocking out nearly 10 percent of the world's daily oil consumption in one blow. But security experts doubt that the plant could be seriously damaged by conventional terrorist weapons like car and truck bombs.

"Unless you have a specialized force of a foreign army, such attacks are impossible to succeed," Nawaf Obaid, managing director of Saudi National Security Assessment Project, a government consultant, told Agence France-Presse. "Nothing short of a nonconventional attack can succeed."

The attackers at Abqaiq were turned back at the first of three electrified security fences that surround the plant, which is also patrolled around the clock by helicopters and F-15 warplanes, in addition to thousands of state security personnel and guards from Aramco, the Saudi state oil company.

On top of that, Saudi security officials said, Abqaiq is highly redundant, meaning that even in the event of a successful strike in one area of the facility, output could be maintained by shifting the processing to other areas.

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Even though the attack may have failed in a tactical sense, Mr. Jones said, it sent out strong symbolic signals.

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That last quoted sentence says a lot about what is wrong with media coverage of the war. The media tends to find significance in failed attacks. This is ridiculous. There is nothing easier than mounting a failed attack. All a failed attack really tells you is something we already know about this enemy. He is a bad guy who wishes us harm, but he lacks the capacity to inflict in most cases. He is continuing to attrite his resources on failed attacks, while his other resources are under constant danger of being found and destroyed.