This story just came up on Yahoo! and I had to comment:

Senate panel votes to block money for Iraq reconstruction.

"The efforts are part of the latest push on Capitol Hill to get Iraq to spend more of its own money and spare U.S. taxpayers. Democrats and many Republicans say it is unfair that Iraq is looking at pulling in as much as $70 billion in oil revenues this year while Americans grapple with soaring fuel prices at the pump."

Umm, excuse me? Who's idea was it to bomb the hell out of the country? Yup, it was us. Sorry folks, you wanna go to war, you gotta pay for it. War is expensive, and the 60% or so that were in favor of going to war back in 2003 can't complain now. The least we can do is fix what we've broken. Too bad we can't compensate the Iraqis for the over 600,000 deaths that were caused by our blood-lust. 

And what's with the "poor us" stuff? We have only ourselves to blame for our fuel woes. We haven't planned for alternative energy, just gobbled up more than our fair share of the world's finite oil supplies. We tore down railroad tracks and built roads. We gave up smaller cars for SUVs and Hummers and haven't complained when congress won't hold our automobile companies to higher fuel standards. We gave up walkable communities for urban sprawl and small homes for McMansions miles from grocery stores. I could go on all day.

I usually cringe when the Republicans talk about personal responsibility (mostly cause they only apply it to the underprivleged) but I gotta say that it's time that we take responsibilty - both for the war in Iraq and for our own wastefully oil consumption.