It is a well-known fact in the oil industry that you can "talk up or down" the price of oil. It only takes rumors of shortages or threats of disruption to raise prices. On the other hand, assurances of plentiful oil and stable military and political conditions help to reduce the price.

Oil industry observers have ascribed up to 30 percent of the increase in oil prices to perceived military and other tensions in oil producing countries.

Ironically, both oil companies and oil exporting countries are reaping windfall profits from high oil prices. They are all benefiting from the daily threats to bomb Iran, or hints at "keeping all the options on the table," or threats to punish Iran for what its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says about Israel.

Every time an American leader, such as President George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney or senators Clinton or McCain, threaten Iran, they help to increase the price of oil.

The five Gulf countries of Iran and its neighbors Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have nearly two-thirds of the world's oil reserves. A major factor in the remarkable rise in the price of oil in the past five years are the frequent threats by Israeli or American leaders or their press who want to bomb Iran, despite their occasional denials.

The reactor at the mouth of the Gulf was first proposed under America's old ally, the shah of Iran.

After Khomeini's revolution of 1979, Russia took up the project. Iran has signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and insists its nuclear program is peaceful. Yet the threats keep coming.

Iran's oil-producing Arab neighbors do not want a war that can perhaps cause them "collateral" military harm. They complain that the only country having nuclear weapons in the Middle East is Israel, and it has not signed the NPT. America's moderate Arab allies in the Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, have called on Israel to sign the NPT and disarm its nuclear weapons.

Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal, pointed out two years ago the false logic of a threat to bomb Israel: it would also obliterate the Palestinian people!

Iran's leadership has itself denied to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) any intent of developing nuclear weapons. Even the U.S. intelligence community agreed last year in its famous estimate that Iran was no longer seeking to develop atomic weapons.

Middle East wars and disruptions historically have caused spikes in the price of oil: the Arab-Israeli wars in 1956, 1967, and 1973; the Iran Revolution of 1979; and periods before or after the American-Iraq wars in 1990-91 and 2003-08.

Anti-Israeli sentiments are running high in the Middle East as Tel Aviv has curtailed fuel and electricity to Gaza, while blaming Iran for fomenting trouble on its borders.

Bush, and senators McCain, Clinton and Barack Obama regularly defend Israel in its confrontations with Iran's allies in Syria (Baath), Gaza (Hamas) and Lebanon (Hezbollah).

Many of the reasons for the world's current economic problems are linked to the leadership of the world's single superpower, the United States. Threatening war around the world's most important oilfields is certainly a major factor.

But there are other reasons, including questions of supply and demand. The United States accounts for almost one of every four barrels of oil consumed each day, whereas the American population is only one of every 20 persons on planet Earth.

U.S. columnist Thomas Friedman has advocated a tax on oil imports to encourage Americans to consume less oil. The savings will also lessen the $450 billion current annual U.S. oil import bill and could help reduce the federal budget deficit. Europe and most other industrial countries already have high taxes on imports.

America's military spending is another cause of concern to Iraq's neighbor, Iran, as also to Russia next door, and to oil imports in China and India. The Pentagon budget was reduced to nearly $300 billion in 2000 under Clinton, but this year is budgeted at $600 billion plus $200 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

U.S. President Lyndon Johnson learned at the height of the Vietnam War that you can't have both guns and butter. Some Bush neocons believed Iraq would open access to Middle Eastern oil and promote regional democracy.

Instead, the opposite has happened.

The international political and economic mismanagement does not auger well. During the past 100 years, the world witnessed two world wars driven partially by the competition for oil resources.

The current situation could be compared to the years before World War I, when the Balkan crises were similar to those in today's Middle East, and to the Great Depression before World War II. The world empires suffered terribly after the first sparks set the guns firing.

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Hassan al-Husseini is a Saudi Arabian writer who served 20 years with the Saudi Arabian Oil Co. (Saudi Aramco) as a senior planning consultant. He is now an oil consultant working and living in Bahrain, and al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia.