Things are not as they appear in the Middle East, for while on the surface things may look pretty bad, underneath they are much worse. And what looks so bad is really the one thing that is going right.

Two nasty car bombings on successive days, a couple of high-level assassinations, and numerous small sniping and other terrorist incidents, on top of unresolved constitutional squabbling between Kurds and Shia, and intra-Shia, and legal chaos surrounding the handover of Saddam Hussein and several thousand other key prisoners still in U.S. custody, have left the Western and Arab media under the impression that the turnover of power to the new Iraqi government is somehow not going smoothly.

Yet all these hits and complications are easily survivable, for the new Iraqi state. They are just the background noise one must increasingly expect wherever Muslim "militants" are confronted with the possibility of an open society. The crescendo is building towards June 30th -- the formal date of transfer from Paul Bremer’s administration to that of Prime Minister Iyad Illawi -- after which the Iraqi music will begin to fade.

Less attention is given to the more worrying, longer-term development. In the vicinity of Basra -- which has been remarkably quiet despite the best efforts of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shia blackshirts to stir up trouble -- two clever acts of sabotage have succeeded in cutting off most of Iraq’s oil exports, for a couple of weeks. The saboteurs were most likely members of cells controlled by the Wahabi Islamist underground in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

The main terminal complex in Basra and a smaller one at Khor al-Amaya nearby had been loading 2.5 million barrels per day, a significant portion of the world’s oil supply, and most of the new Iraq’s income. The pipeline through Syria is down by policy, and that through the Kurdish north and Turkey (with a capacity well under 1 million barrels per day) has been cut to a trickle by frequent small terrorist hits.

The problem here is that oil pipelines and facilities have become targets of choice. They were always fairly easy to hit, but as Arab psychopaths from Osama bin Laden down used to argue publicly, they must not be hit because they are the unique source of Arab wealth, power, and prestige. To stop the flow of oil is to cut: 1. the ability of the "Arab nation" to hold the industrialized nations hostage; 2. their ability to fund the terror networks, and the parallel networks of Wahabi madrasas, mosques, charities, and political fronts that proselytize for radical Islam across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Worse (from an Al Qaeda point of view), the destruction of the oil weapon would mean, ultimately, 3. the loss of the Arab ability to shape, direct, and define Islam for non-Arab Muslims in our post-modern world.

Desperate times require desperate measures, however -- the Islamist "militants" have been, since 9/11, losing materially on almost every front -- and it is becoming clear that the leaders have been rethinking their approach. It becomes very clear, when one looks into Saudi Arabia, and finds a purposeful strategy to "drive out the infidels" by assassinating carefully selected Western technologists upon whom continuous Saudi oil production most depends.

For two months now, the U.S. State Department, working on the premise that people’s lives are more important than people’s money, have been advising American nationals to get out of Saudi Arabia, in response to the terrorist campaign. They are in fact leaving, faster and faster. While the House of Saud can still contrive to pump oil at something like the present volume for a few months using Saudi nationals and the less skilled foreign workers not yet targeted, the oil infrastructure will then collapse. It depends entirely on American, Japanese, and European expertise.

This makes the possibility of a world oil crisis on a scale beyond anything experienced in 1974 or 1979 entirely thinkable in the coming winter. It explains why the U.S., Japan, Germany and other leading oil-dependent countries have been building inventories at an unprecedented rate, even at high current oil prices.

There is another regional issue of some urgency: that Iran’s ayatollahs are on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons. That is very serious, and almost nothing is being done about it, in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election. Call that potential Armageddon No. 1.

But Armageddon No. 2 must also be considered: fanatical Arabs having decided, on behalf of all their brethren, that they must try to turn the world’s oil supply into one big suicide bomb.