A panel discussion on "American Power and Global Security" was held last night to discuss America's role in world issues.

Three speakers took part in the panel at the State College Municipal Building, 243 S. Allen St., with almost 100 community members present to ask questions and voice opinions.

Despite sentiment that might make one think otherwise, Penn State political science professor D. Scott Bennett said the world has become gradually safer since 1991.

He said the most terrorism-related deaths in one year totaled 4,500 people in 2001.

"We don't feel safer now because we are the ones under attack," Bennett said.

Bennett compared the 3,300 American deaths that year to the 30,000 that occurred due to automobile accidents, but noted the number of deaths due to terrorism in America is rising.

Joseph Filko, an insurance consultant and Penn State business instructor, said people often disagree how the United States should make the world a safer and better place, but they agree that we should try.

"We agree on a destination, just not the road map," he said as an analogy.

Filko said a common fallacy is that in order to make the rest of the world stronger, the United States must become weaker.

"The truth is you cannot help the weak by weakening the strong," he said.

Lt. Col. Daniel Miltenberger said the army has had to move out of other parts of the world to concentrate in Iraq.

"One hundred forty-thousand of our 400,000 members in the army are in Iraq, and this has repercussions in places like the Korean peninsula," he said.

However, Miltenberger said our cause in the war is right, even though there is a great debate if the place of the war is right.

"The U.S. cannot sit back and do nothing because if we don't, we would continue to have things much worse than 9/11 with greater consequences," he said.

Filko said, going back to World War II, that if we had a preventative war against Adolph Hitler, there would be just as much opposition to it, as there is to Iraq. No one would have known that over six million lives were saved.

"We don't know what we have prevented in the war of Iraq," he said. "I tolerate it. I think it's arrogant to assume we've done the wrong thing or the right thing because you don't know."

H. Alan Weisel, of State College, said he thought the panel discussion was interesting, although it didn't change his views. He said the forum primarily addressed the issues from a military perspective, but noted that is only one way the United States interacts with the world.