Osama bin Laden claims to have bled the Soviet Union into bankruptcy as an Islamic guerrilla fighter in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Could he do the same to another hated superpower: the United States?

The al-Qaida leader’s latest purported communication drove home the point by calling on militants to stop the flow of oil to the West and praising a Dec. 6 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil producer.

In an audiotape posted on an Islamic Web site Thursday, a man who U.S. officials believe was bin Laden accused Westerners of subjugating the Middle East to plunder its oil.

“Go on and try to prevent them from getting oil,” the speaker said. “Concentrate your operations on that, especially in Iraq and the Gulf.”

It was believed to be the first time a purported bin Laden tape in effect called for attacks on the oil industry. But he has flaunted the economic theme before, recalling in his most recent video how Afghan mujahedeen “bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt” and taunting the U.S. government over the size of its budget deficit — which peaked at $413 billion last year.

Security and terrorism experts suggest bin Laden’s claims to be undermining the United States economically are largely propaganda, noting the flexible, market-driven U.S. economy is a far cry from the creaky, bureaucratic Soviet giant that disintegrated in 1991.

Still, the economic argument gives bin Laden a tool he can use to rally his supporters and inflate his aura of success by claiming damage caused by other factors as his own handiwork.

Bin Laden “sees us as poised on this precipice, and he’s going to push us into the abyss,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Rand Corp.

As Bin Laden put it in his video aimed at Americans just days before the Nov. 2 presidential election: “The real loser is you. It is the American people and their economy.”

The al-Qaida leader cites the experience of Afghan mujahedeen fighters “in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers” to drive the Soviets out.

Bin Laden was among U.S.-supported Islamic fighters in Afghanistan, backed with money and weapons in hopes of weakening Russia, the United States’ opponent in the Cold War.

Retired Gen. William Odom, a scholar at the Hudson Institute and an expert in the Soviet collapse, said bin Laden’s analogy is off base since the Soviet Union collapsed for reasons other than Afghanistan, including the weakness of its state-run economy.

As far as spending on Iraq, Odom said damage to the U.S. economy was attributable to the Bush administration embarking on a costly war. In the fall 2003, Congress approved $87.5 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and $25 billion last spring, and Bush is expected to request $75 billion to $100 billion in 2005.

“If we’re stupid enough to go off and do something like that, bin Laden can justly crow about it,” Odom said. “But I don’t think he can take credit for having caused it.”