Nearly 200 people, many of them foreigners, have died in violent attacks on a variety of targets in Saudi Arabia over the last 18 months - 12 of them yesterday at the United States consulate in Jeddah, the hitherto peaceable town on the Red Sea.
This latest incident raises fears once again of instability in the oil-rich kingdom, which were immediately echoed on world markets. They were linked yesterday to events in neighbouring Iraq by President Bush, when he said such attacks are part of a plan by the terrorist organisation al-Qaeda to disrupt plans for elections there next month.
Al-Qaeda's extensive Saudi connections are highlighted by this very determined attack on one of the most intensively defended US facilities abroad. Despite Saudi Arabia's close economic and political relations with the US, anti-Americanism is widespread there, arising from a deep resentment about the dependence involved. Al-Qaeda feeds into that frustration, but does not have widespread support as a result of it. Saudi Arabia has seen extensive socio-economic development arising from its oil wealth. But it no longer has the resources to sustain the expectations of a growing middle class, whose standards of living have recently been affected by falling incomes, higher unemployment and the huge sums necessary to sustain the ruling families and a bloated military budget.
There is a complete mismatch between the country's wealth and its archaic political structures, many of them based on a continuing alliance between the ruling House of Saud, an extensive network of more than 5,000 princely families and the extreme Muslim fundamentalist Wahhabi religious establishment which controls social life, education and the justice system. A more educated and sophisticated generation of Saudis, including a growing women's movement, craves reform but finds its aspirations stifled by factional struggles and repression. There are deep-seated fears among the 35,000 foreigners working in the oil industry, and the roughly similar number working in other sectors of its economy who are increasingly targeted in these attacks. Overall, the 22 million population includes some six million Arab and Asian guest workers. So the future of the kingdom will undoubtedly affect the rest of the Middle East profoundly.
Mr Bush sees the elections in Iraq as part of a much wider strategy to democratise the region. Such a perspective looks radical indeed as seen from Saudi Arabia. But Saudis and citizens of other Arab states insist that unless a start is made with finding a resolution of the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict there is no chance that it will succeed. This message is reaching Mr Bush from many different quarters since his re-election and will be a prominent theme when he visits Europe next year in an effort to revive transatlantic relations by seeking help with transferring sovereignty back to Iraqis. The issues at stake are underlined once again by these Saudi events.