As anticipated on this weblog, the fall-out of the "big bang" in Iraq, has accelerated system disruption's displacement of symbolic terrorism. In fact, what's left of symbolic terrorism is now typically restricted to attacks that can cause immediate systemic social failure (as we are seeing in Iraq right now). The combination of the Abqaiq attack and this new attempted attack on a major power station in Jordan shows that al Qaeda has adopted infrastructure disruption as its preferred method of warfare (good thing my book is in editing right now). Reuters:
A group of al Qaeda militants arrested by Jordanian authorities had planned to blow up a major power plant that feeds the whole country, security sources said on Thursday. Jordan announced on Wednesday it had foiled an al Qaeda "terrorist plot" and arrested two Iraqis and a Libyan who were plotting to carry out a suicide attack against a vital civilian installation. Officials said the arrests took place last week.
I anticipate that al Qaeda will continue to refine their method by decreasing the scale of their attacks (which would reduce planning time, resource requirements, and chance of discovery). Large suicide attacks on relatively hard targets offer low rates of return once the potential of success has been factored in. Similar levels of performance can be achieved, as demonstrated in Iraq and Balochistan, through better systems analysis.
This attempt also confirms that systems disruption will be the method used within the US during the next attack.