I recently came across this article written in 2001 and published in the NY Times. In retrospect it reminded me of bin Laden’s initial goal at the offset of this ‘war.’ His intentions were to boost the price of oil, thus destabilizing the global market and subsequently bringing the US to its knees through economic warfare. As oil hits its all-time high, and speculators speculating that it still hasn’t peaked in its soaring price, I figured on Independence Day it would be the appropriate time to ask, ‘did Osama win?’
He’s still on the run eating, oil is a hundred plus a barrel, Al Qeada is still thriving, Afghanistan is emerging as a major thorn in the side of coalition forces and the US can’t even pin a conviction down on the bombers of the USS Cole let alone the purported masterminds behind 9/11. Minus the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis they’ve killed and a few thousand combatants who don’t mind dying these goons are still putting in major work. The US is planning to engage Al Qaeda in North Africa, Somalia, Pakistan, Iran and lord knows where else they are conducting black-ops trying to destabilize a government so they can topple the power structure, create a vacuum and insert a puppet. Peep what was being said in 2001 about Osama’s ambitions as a rider:
”If bin Laden takes over and becomes king of Saudi Arabia, he’d turn off the tap,” said Roger Diwan, a managing director of the Petroleum Finance Company, a consulting firm in Washington. ”He said at one point that he wants oil to be $144 a barrel” — about six times what it sells for now.
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the subsequent battering of the global economy have stretched the edges of imagination. Most Western politicians and oil industry experts say they believe assurances from the Middle East that oil supplies will stay stable as the American-led attacks on terrorist groups continue. But in such a profoundly changed world, they concede, anything is possible.
Neela Banerjee
October 14, 2001
New York Times
STREET KNOWLEDGE 