Another devastating attack over the weekend in Riyadh, underscoring the fact that the battle has been taken to the Muslim heartland. Two things occurred to me. One, for all the warnings about the al-Qaeda threat I find a bomb in a residential Saudi neighborhood, and I am not discounting the horrors of seeing dead and wounded civilians including children, a feeble show of force. The other thought related to the targeting of Muslims, here’s the Daily Telegraph:

The attack has engendered unprecedented condemnation throughout the Middle East and will have damaged al-Qa'eda's appeal as anti-western and pro-Islamic.

Or not. They attacked middle class Saudis that adopted Western lifestyles and by doing so sent a very strong signal to the growing disenfranchised masses living in poverty in the wealthy kingdom. One part of the message is that only strict adherence to the Islamist norms that al-Qaeda propagates will ensure you a measure of safety and secondly, as I have argued before, the battle is equally economic. The disgruntled and unemployed poor need to be mobilized against the privileged few. Those arguments are wrapped in the all encompassing strategy to instill fear and to do whatever is necessary to destabilize the House of Saud. It is likely that the fall-out of this attack will be negative for al-Qaeda, not because the nature of the bombing was so heinous, but because strategies based on infusing fear have a history of failing in the long run. Yet, they also have a history of running long before they run out of steam.