ABSTRACT
Intelligence experts speak of warning "signals" and obscuring "noise", forever hoping to discover some magic technique that will extract the right signals from the mass of irrelevant or misleading noise. Yet the warning it contains can still be ignored, and so far that is exactly what is happening in the case of the Dhahran bombing. To ignore the Dhahran warning on the grounds that the only useful remedy—a stiff oil tax—is a political impossibility, is an evasion of responsibility by all those who know the numbers, including many politicians not a few reporters, and absolutely every energy expert. What is important for the United States, as for other oil-importing countries, is to heed the warning of Dhahran. Once the added security measures have been implemented, once Iran's standing encouragement of Saudi terrorists is dissuaded by economic counter-threats, no time should be wasted before squarely confronting the altogether broader issue of energy security.
