Americans Are Buying Gas For Iraqis ...

... (including insurgents).

Found another article on this topic. Key paragraph, I thought, is below.

• Although Iraq is a major petroleum producer, the country has little capacity to refine its own gasoline. So the U.S. government pays about $1.50 a gallon to buy fuel in neighboring countries and deliver it to Iraqi stations. A three-month supply costs American taxpayers more than $500 million, not including the cost of military escorts to fend off attacks by Iraqi insurgents.

I can understand the logic.

I would expect Iraqis to be generally unhappy about their country being occupied by foreign soldiers. And if Iraqis were accustomed to paying very low prices for their gasoline under Saddam, it's logical to expect that they would be significantly more unhappy about the occupation if as a byproduct of Saddam's ouster they had to pay market prices for their gasoline.

But I'll be damned if I will agree that that allocation of my money (tax dollars) is acceptable. It is not. It's really like taxing me twice. I pay my taxes. (Yes, I'm a sucker, as noted by Gary North in this column.) And I pay the current (very high) market price for gasoline at the pump here in Texas. Oh, it's really like taxing me three times. Because I also pay that $.184 per gallon federal tax, unless the federales repeal it. (I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.)