The Attack on Luxor Temple 1997 - Egypt's 9/11

When the West talks about terror attacks, the November 17, 1997 attack at the Luxor ruins of Hatpshepsut is never mentioned. But it led directly to 9/11.

A mass-casualty attack, it victims were mostly Western and the attackers were Radical Islamists. It was well planned and well executed. The victims were unarmed tourists including babies and small children. The attackers spared the lives of the Egyptian tour guides while hunting down and killing the tourists using guns and knives and clubs.

During the killing, the attackers danced and praised Allah.

Swiss survivors told reporters that the "militants beat small children with guns, raped and mutilated women, and danced for joy as they massacred tourists at Hatshepsut Temple."

In hindsight, Luxor was the tipping point for both Egypt and the future. Its lessons for the terrorists were clear - it worked. It severely damaged Egypt's tourist industry - and Egypt's economy, and it showed that Law Enforcement could not stop a sapper-style attack.

In retrospect, it was Egypt's 9/11.

Egypt responded - using every means at its disposal at home and abroad to fight the terrorists. And what some in the press ignore, Egypt won the war.

But, the reaction of many who supported the Insurgency in Egypt was to leave Egypt. "The violent (Islamists) left Egypt to fight in Afghanistan and Chechnya," said an Egyptian political analyst. These men left to help other subsidiaries of Terror, Inc. In their retreat from Egypt, the losers went on to support the Taliban and the Chechens.

One of the losers was Zawahiri, who had founded the group that planned the attack in Luxor. He would later become the number 2 Al-Qaeda leader and help plan and execute the 9/11 attack on the United States.

John Boyd and Iraq : Looking in and Looking Out

The Boyd Cycle links information to action. Its primary discoverer Colonel John Boyd combined his military background with his unique ability at introspection to distill the essence of conflict while examining how ideas survive. The notion of sense-based conceptualization, the continous testing of ideas, and the spiral-nature of knowledge is not new. Indeed, the nature of competing ideas has been documented in many levels in many fields from economics to geology. One of the most colorful commentators on epistemology was the realistic, Nobel-winning Physicist Dick Feynman.

What does this have to do with being outside the decision cycle? William Lind wrote a panicked essay in the Spring where he wrote about "the growing probability is that we will be driven out of Iraq by a general uprising".

Where is the uprising?

Despite the fact that General "Speed Freak" Tommy Franks started planning OEF hours after the planes hit the World Trade Center and OEF began in a landlocked nation where the US had no bases nearby just 29 days after 9/11, Lind boldy spouts, "Second Generation military such as America’s does not improvise well under time pressure."

In other essays he goes on about the "Canon". For some reason he thinks 4GW is new.

Yet, Japan has had many incidents. The US had the raid on Harper's Ferry. Going back further in time, there are other examples - William of Orange got so far into the mind of James II that James lost his nerve.

Where does Lind get his information?

Good facts are the raw food for feeding the OODA loop. Does he derive it firsthand from being on the ground in Iraq as Boyd would demand? Does Lind work in a G2 that is in the thick of collecting and processing information? Is he a node in a loop somewhere? While there is no doubt that Lind is a good writer and original thinker, he IS far removed from the action.

His essays remind me of two other writers North ( remember how the Y2k bug would destroy us?) and Hanson ( counterargument) both of whom were and still are far removed from the technologies of the issue they wrote about.

Lind, Like Hanson and North, works from a theoretical framework, but all three selectively input information into their mental models. Lind ignores successful US Counterinsurgencies such as recent operations in Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, AND Afghanistan, etc. Further, all three did not factor in the human operators in the loops as possessing more and higher quality information and being able to act upon it.

In fact, Lind seems to ignore the operator of the loop by not considering the considerable evidence that Centcom has prodigious abilities in gathering and effectively acting upon intelligence. Lind is outside the Furball in Iraq and it shows.