Spurring five years of increased homeland security provisions and strengthened surveillance of U.S. citizens, the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks left the nation with much to reflect on, especially at UW-Madison.
Professors offering various perspectives on the attacks gathered in a forum organized by UW-Madison's Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy and the Division of International Studies at Memorial Union Monday afternoon.
Dean of International Studies Gilles Bousquet first announced the implementation of a new UW-Madison interdisciplinary Global Security Initiative, purposely unveiled on the fifth anniversary of the attacks. The program aims to educate politicians, business leaders and citizens about issues of global security, including new technological and biological threats.
""9/11 forced us to rethink our basic assumptions about security,"" said Jeremi Suri, director of the new Global Security Initiative, explaining that the United States is traditionally seen as a ""reactive state"" that prefers to ""wait and see"" what happens in issues of global security before acting.
Denouncing the United States' slow reaction time to previous attacks on the World Trade Center, Suri said the federal government must work on recognizing potential threats, attempting to slow terrorists' speed of destruction and identifying the opposing nation's mobility.
Commanding officer of UW-Madison's Naval ROTC unit Capt. Scott Mobley said he wished to provide more of a front-line perspective on the global security issues discussed.
Before 9/11, U.S. attention focused on potential security issues with no clear consensus of which nations or institutions could be considered serious threats, according to Mobley. Now, he said, government concentration remains on further developing the ability to defeat biological and nuclear warfare capabilities. Schedules are no longer regular, he said, with troops ""ready to deploy with a phone call.""
International Studies Director Jon Pevehouse said that national opinion has changed in these five years but not enough, citing a record-high 45 percent of Americans think the United States should remain out of foreign affairs. He also said bureaucratic politics as another factor preventing citizens and the government from global security progress.
Center for Human Performance and Risk Analysis Director Vicki Bier declared the U.S. government should refrain from paying excessive attention to the threat of terrorist attacks and instead focus on issues of potentially immediate concern.
For example, according to Bier, if a severe influenza pandemic were to hit the United States, it could easily kill millions in contrast to the World Trade Center's approximately 3,000 fatalities. Bier stressed the importance of focusing on issues like global warming and natural disasters rather than constantly feeding government funds toward preventing the next terrorist attack.
""There also is still a potential for major industrial accidents,"" Bier added. ""And certainly some of the worst projections for global warming make Hurricane Katrina seem small by comparison.""
