Mission Accomplished

The quote in the paragraph below this was published in the New York Times on October 14, 2001 - one month after the attack on the World Trade Center, when it was feared that "sympathizers of Osama bin Laden" would sink oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz or that Arab countries would cut off oil production, or that the pro-American Saud family would be toppled:

''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 price of oil reached $144/barrel this week. That's without any attacks on oil tankers or Saudi production. It was achieved by the United States, first by invading Iraq in 2003 (at which point oil was about $30/barrel), then by spending trillions of dollars we don't have to finance the war, which resulted in the dollar falling to its current near-worthless level, and finally by the actions of the U.S. and Israel threatening to attack Iran, which propelled the oil price from $80-100/barrel to the current $140+.

Don't believe it? Embedded above is a graph showing the price of oil from the beginning of 2001, through the WTC attacks and the start of the war up through the start of this year. The blue line shows the cost of oil in USD, the red line shows it in Euros, and the purple line shows the price in ounces of gold.

We accomplished bin Laden's goal for him. You're doing a heckuva job, guys.