Robert Fisk: Why Osama bin Laden would be smiling today

To look at those images of the French oil tanker Limburg, scorched and holed on the skyline of the Yemeni coast, you had to remember the very last sermon Osama bin Laden gave before he disappeared in Afghanistan last December.

The American economy, he said, would be destroyed.

"Oil tankers," a Palestinian friend told me a couple of weeks later. "If he goes for the oil tankers, the Americans will have to escort every tanker round the Gulf with a warship.Think what that would do to the price of oil."

Yesterday -- as the world mulled over the Limburg captain's report of a small explosives-laden boat ramming itself against the side of his 300,000 ton double-hulled supertanker -- the price of a barrel of oil duly broke the US$30 envelope.

First we had the USS Cole two years ago, almost sunk by suicide bombers at the cost of 17 US sailors' lives. Then we had the al Qaeda men arrested in Morocco this year for allegedly planning to sink an American or British warship off the straits of Gibraltar. And now the Limburg.

The oil markets were yesterday studying the announcement from Yemen's prime minister, Abdul-Kader Bajammal, that the explosion had been inside the vessel, that "terrorism" was not involved.

A likely story, the oil barons must have thought, given that this is precisely what the Yemenis originally said about the attack on the Cole. The French government yesterday did not rule out an attack.

Captain Peter Raes, speaking on behalf of the owners of the vessel Compagnie Maritime Belge, which owns the ship's operators, Euronav, said: "Another vessel colliding with the tanker would never have had the energy to break through to the cargo hold tank," he said.

Raes said the force tore a very large hole eight metres by six across the hull of the ship which was unlikely to have been made by any gas leakage. He ruled out any gas build-up or leakage as the tanker was fitted with sensor alarms which would have notified the crew of a problem.

"On top of that the explosion occurred on the water line - There is absolutely nothing which can trigger an explosion at that height," he said.

In Bahrain yesterday, US military sources indicated that the 5th Fleet was now examining the security of oil tanker fleets throughout the Gulf. During the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, US warships were forced to accompany Kuwaiti-bound tankers up the Gulf to protect them from Iranian attack -- but the US vessels themselves hit mines.

US warships would again be exposed to danger if forced to protect convoys around the Gulf, travelling always -- as in the Second World War -- at the speed of the slowest vessel.

So one more tanker attack like that on the Limburg and the American navy could be back in the convoy business again, vulnerable to the same small killer boats that assaulted the Cole.

The price of oil would go on rising -- giving Washington even greater reason to invade Iraq and lower the price of crude by seizing Saddam's oil fields. Osama bin Laden is alive, travelling with his lieutenant, Egyptian Ayman Al Zawahri, living in Afghanistan and plotting more attacks, according to a satellite telephone conversation reportedly intercepted over the weekend by US and Afghan intelligence.

Be he on earth or in the netherworld, he must be smiling today.