American taxpayers have been spending billions of dollars repairing and rebuilding Iraq, on the theory that the U.S. government broke that country and has a responsibility to fix it. But, with some stability coming at last to Iraq, and high oil prices filling its coffers, it is time for the Iraqis to use some of their wealth to spruce up the place.

A new report requested by U.S. Senators Carl Levin (D.-Mich.) and John Warner (R.-Va.) found that Iraq’s budget surplus is nearing $79 billion (compared to our $450 billion deficit), but the country is spending only a tiny fraction of that on reconstruction. American taxpayers have poured $48 billion into reconstruction since the United States led a coalition that toppled the country’s murderous dictator Saddam Hussein and helped put a fledgling democracy in his place.

The senators noted, “The Iraqi government now has tens of billions of dollars at its disposal to fund large-scale reconstruction projects. It is inexcusable for U.S. taxpayers to continue to foot the bill for projects the Iraqis are fully capable of funding themselves.”

Well said. Those taxpayer dollars are greatly needed here — for, among other things, our own reconstruction projects, such as rebuilding crumbling roads and bridges.

To be fair, some of this has to do with very complex and changeable circumstances in Iraq. That country, thanks to the American troop “surge,” has recently achieved major progress in fighting insurgents, some who are foreign-based, trying to sow misery for U.S. troops and topple Iraq’s democratic government, whose example poses a risk to the region’s kleptocratic dictatorships. For that reason, it has only recently been able to step up oil production to high levels, piling up money in the process. It has also been fair to ask whether the Iraqi government was strong enough, with enough checks against corruption, to handle this task of rebuilding on its own.

But things are gradually getting more stable, oil prices should stay quite high and Iraq’s government should be spending more of its national wealth to rebuild its own country. After all, Iraq did get something out of this deal along with the horrors of war: the removal of a vicious dictator, and the potential to flourish as a representative democracy.

For that matter, it is high time that the United States applied greater pressure to many nations to pitch in with world affairs. America, superpower or not, cannot afford to carry the world on its shoulders.

It maintains a massive military force, for example, while Europe and Canada essentially pour their money into social services, counting on the United States to be there fighting terrorism and other threats as the need arises. America maintains that military out of its perceived self-interest, of course, because it wants to be strong enough to protect itself independently, and because it cannot count on its allies to bear their fair share of advancing mutual interests. But if the grotesquely unfair U.S. burden continues much longer, our “allies” will see a return of some sort of U.S. isolationism.