A few years ago in Dhahran, the Saudi state oil company, Aramco, gave me a tour of its headquarters, a facility so sparkling and orderly that one could forget that its whole purpose was to extract from the ground one of the filthiest substances on Earth. The most impressive stop on the tour was the Aramco emergency command center, which I imagine is paying its workers a lot of overtime right now. It looked like the control room for a mission to Alpha Centauri. Men and women sat at their stations. The walls were aglow with constellations of green lights—each one, my host said, representing a functioning object in the Aramco galaxy of pipelines, valves, ships, buses, heat exchangers, and drill bits. If a light flashed red, it meant one of these objects was broken, and the people at those stations would vault into action to support the crew restoring it.
One major question in the current war is why Iran has so far failed, or perhaps declined, to make life miserable for the people in that room. The vow to annihilate energy infrastructure is one of two threats—American and Iranian—that remain, as of this writing, unfulfilled. On March 17, after Israel attacked Iran’s South Pars gas field, Iran threatened five key oil-and-gas facilities in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Last weekend, Donald Trump wrote that if Iran failed to open the Strait of Hormuz in exactly 48 hours, “the United States of America will hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS, STARTING WITH THE BIGGEST ONE FIRST!” (American air superiority over Iran is matched only by its overwhelming advantage in CAPITAL LETTERS, which Persian lacks.) So far, Trump has not attacked the power plants—in fact, on Thursday he extended the deadline to April 6—and most of the oil infrastructure in the region remains intact.
