The (al) Khobar Attacks on Saturday, May 29

Growing up in Saudi Arabia, I guess Ann and I become de facto Saudi "experts" -- at least we know more than the average Joe. I'm sure some of you have been wondering about this latest attack, in which oil company employees and other foreigners have been held hostage by purported Al-Qa'eda militants. No Aramcons were involved, thankfully. (That we've heard about so far, anyway.)

It's very saddening to me that things have gotten so out of hand in the Kingdom these days. This attack in Khobar (pronounced "CO-bar" in Aramcon lingo) is the closest yet to the place I grew up, the Aramco compound in Dhahran, and it brings the whole situation right "in your face,"as they say. Khobar is just a few miles down the road from Dhahran; Aramcons could even get several shopping buses there each day.

You have to imagine Khobar (or Al-Khobar) back when I was growing up. It had been a dirt-poor little fishing village on the Persian Gulf before the oil "bidness" came to town, and it then became the (sad little) "port" for Aramco before roads and an airport came along. Even in the '60s when I was a kid, Khobar was a Tijuana wannabe, a dusty, run-down little commercial district outside the compound for all the rich American Aramco employees (or so the shop-keepers imagined) to buy the trinkets they couldn't buy in Dhahran. It was the closest town you could get to to "get out of town" - a regularly scheduled bus ran from the busstop at the Dhahran baseball field to a point in "downtown" Khobar, where Aramco wives could go to shop for flipflips for the kids, toys, Time magazine, Indian brass trinkets, etc. There weren't even any eating places or hotels until the late 60s. In those days, the thought of radical Islamic militants shooting up Saudi police and taking Western expatriate workers hostage in KHOBAR would have been more unthinkable than a Vietcong raid on Oostburg, Wisconsin!

When the family left Arabia in the summer of '77, Khobar had come a long way, with decent restaurants and more Western-looking store layouts, fancy new apartments, etc. Almost twenty years later, when I was teaching in Arabia in 1995, Khobar was as glitzy as parts of Houston, with a Fuddruckers gourmet hamburger restaurant, posh air-conditioned malls selling Compaq computers, 6-lane divided boulevards, etc. Today, Khobar, Dhahran and Dammam (always the larger city) have grown together in urban sprawl to become a single megalopolis of 1 million inhabitants. (That also blows my mind!)

I'm afraid I have no idea where this "Oasis" compound is where the militants are holed up (there are scores of them around the area to house foreign workers) . I read carefully through all the place names mentioned in the Reuters article, and not a single one registered. But that, in one sense, is GOOD news. It didn't strike any of my old haunts, and the terrorists (cross your fingers here) still have yet to direct an attack at the Aramco compound where thousands of Americans still live and where Ann and I grew up. But these same militants could just as easily have driven their truck 7 miles the other direction and reached the gates of Dhahran. And plans may well be in the works - if they can get passed Aramco's legendary security.

The worrisome thing is that now civilian Western employees have become targets (and the Khobar attacks are only the latest of several on them since 9/11). The US State Department has warned Americans to leave Arabia (except for those manning key positions), and it will be very hard to get the older workers with families to stay, much less attract new workers from the West. That will entail a major brain drain in the Kingdom, at least in the next year, and the Saudi Royal Family may well find itself fighting for its life in a civil war that could mean political turmoil throughout the Muslim world (Mecca and Medina are in the care of the royal family) and a huge spike in oil prices. Oil, in fact, just took a turn the other direction today, back up to $40, and the commodity trading week hasn't even begun! One of the leaders of the local Saudi Islamist groups is promising a war against the royal family, so things are just heating up.

At least the Saudi government is no longer living in denial about 9/11 and Islamic extremism. Terror has come to their own shores, and they have suddenly begun to act against it, which will help all the world's countries in the long run. The short run, however, could be very messy ...