Pothole repair threat to multitudinous glories of Islam.

A Chinese gentleman remarked years ago that the flush toilet brought more culture to China than 5,000 years of native Chinese culture. While this view vastly underrates the inestimable cultural value of Dragon Fire take-out noodles, it highlights a simple truth: having loose shoes, tight . . . no, wait, that was an ufnrelated truth briefly in the forefront of the U.S. national debate some years back.

Oops.

Ok, ok. It is a Certified Good Thing (CGT) for people to be able to avail theyselves of, like, you know, sybarritic excesses such as clean water, roads, sewage disposal systems, power, sugar-coated breakfast cereals, etc.

I mean, isn't it?

You'd think there'd be some consensus on this point among warring factions, esp. those involved in guerilla wars where everything's pretty much at the tactical level.

That the Taliban undertook to kidnap British engineer David Addison on 8/31/05 and apparently kill him tells you a lot about the dog-in-the-manger mindset of the too-tight-turban set. What we have, in short, is the usual, the ubiquitous, the widespread, the routine, the vast, the @#$%g always-to-be-expected, achingly-painfully-obvious Jihadi lack of self confidence.

Mr. Addison, at a huge risk to himself, went to Afghanistan to help improve the road from Kandahar to . . . well, from one sorry pit in Afghanistan to another sorry pit in Afghanistan.

But something as simple as a road improvement exercise by the opposition is an impossible-to-tolerate undermining of the whole popsicle stick, Rube Goldberg ideological structure of "Fortress Islam™."

Apocalyptic clash # 78,294: Rivalscelestialgloryitselfreligion of Islam v. Infidel Pothole Repair Project.

Point: Infidels.

WTF!?!?!?!?!?

Red alert to local, punitive platoon: Lose the guy who's making Islam look bad. Ah'ite?

The Colonel continues to hone his knowledge of the ROP™ still at its present vestigial stage, alas. But even the Colonel can see that there is a ton of plausible denial available to The Faithful in that they can pick and choose between whatever local particular brand of Muslim authenticity they can dig up in the back of some bail bonds/pawn shop/cashforSemtex Mosquette.

Finding receptive imamical interpretation of Allah's holy word in synch with whatever adolescent or late Ordovician worldview the pilgrim might have, the pilgrim can charge off on his own little jihad with not a peep from the ummah or some vaguely rational subset thereof.

If the result is too much even for Gooneybird Muslim sensibilities there can be pro forma nose-holding from CAIR and the Saudi embassy typing pool supervisor in Zimbabwe.

But day-to-day ops are still in the hands of -- and fired by the fears and imaginings of -- such like Mr. Khan or my Perennial Pal, Gunner Ghandour,^[1] whose grasp of the basics of civil society is, it might be posited, tenous. Since ignorance and youthful stupidity can alway find a receptive place to live in the worldwide Islamic condo development scheme of things we will continue to be plagued by the likes of children like Mr. Khan and Mr. Ghandour.

"Dog in the Manger" will live on forever as the operating principle of Jihadis, who will kill any other Muslim who disagrees.

Notes
^[1] The Gunner never fails to remind the Colonel what century is the point of reference for the Jihadis. We just hate to reveal our splentic nature so blatantly, but, gosh, if ever there were a guy who should be kept in a zoo, wouldn't it be he?