When terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the world changed drastically. But rather than winding down, that change is continuing steadily, experts say.
A faculty panel with specialties in separate areas of international studies and history that met on campus Tuesday discussed ways in which the world today is different than it was one year ago, and the dynamics of that change. The panel focused on affairs in other parts of the world and spent some time talking about American international policy.
David Leheny, who has worked at the State Department on projects for containing terrorism and is in the University of Wisconsin’s department of political science, described how beliefs about the organization of the al Qaeda terrorist network have shifted since immediately after the attacks. Originally strategists thought al Qaeda, which claims responsibility for the strikes last September, was a worldwide network with multiple and replaceable hubs of activity, Leheny said. But he said it is now perceived differently as a widespread group of operatives with common fundamentalist training rooted in Afghanistan.
The current U.S. administration’s policy of constant and global awareness is “not as necessary as we are saying,” he said.
Like Leheny, the other panelists favored speaking not about why views about the world are different because of last Sept. 11, but how those views have changed since. David Morgan, director of the Middle East Studies program at UW, spoke in part about Afghanistan’s new chances for recovery and the aesthetics of such revitalization.
“It really is a beautiful place,” Morgan said.
He also described how Americans might have taken note that other Middle Eastern countries such as Iran regarded the United States sympathetically immediately after the attacks. That mood, he said, has now changed, referring to President Bush’s plans for more military intervention in the Persian Gulf.
At those times when faculty members made politicized comments, the several dozen people in the audience reacted noisily.
History professor Jeremi Suri prefaced remarks about the tendency of some to blame America for Islamist violence by distinguishing between economic and fundamentalist interests.
Suri also provided an interesting analogy to terrorist threats, comparing al Qaeda and groups like them to Barbary pirates who plagued U.S. shipping interests in North Africa and the Mediterranean during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency.
“New technologies present new vulnerabilities,” Suri said, speaking of hijacked trade ships and aircraft simultaneously.
All the panelists suggested last Sept. 11 illustrated how globalization creates a flow of capital and people but at the same time allows ideologies, including hatred, to travel. Dean of International Studies Gilles Bousquet, who introduced the discussion, said the attacks made observers more acutely aware of how transfer among world communities goes every way. People learned more vividly about a divide between two worlds, Bousquet said, calling those worlds “the north and the south.”
