OUR HONOLULU

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

Honolulu resident Ann Wright was chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Mongolia after 17 years with the State Department when she resigned in protest on the day the United States invaded Iraq.

What interested me about her protest is that Wright has been on the ground during quite a few U.S. military operations around the world, not only with the State Department but as an officer specializing in civilian affairs in the U.S. Army for 26 years. She retired as a colonel.

"I believe that military force is necessary under certain circumstances," she said. "But in this case my gut feeling was that the need for military action just didn't ring true. First, we were diverting resources from the real war on terrorism, which is in Afghanistan.

"I had been there with a five-person team in 2001 to reopen the U.S. Embassy. I saw what challenges we're facing there; the need for more people, more money, more programs, more security forces. To divert to a questionable threat in Iraq wasn't credible to me.

"What led to my decision is that I had been in a lot of crisis situations. In the first place, I'd been part of the U.S. intervention in Grenada in 1983 as an Army officer.

"I had participated in the crises in Panama and Nicaragua — Panama in the Army, Nicaragua in the State Department. I had been in Somalia working with the United Nations to set up the justice system. I knew something about civil reconstruction.

"I'd also been acting ambassador in Sierra Leone when we had three days to get 2,500 Americans out of the country because rebels had taken over. I have been in military operations to regain territory. I knew the destruction that goes with it. I related that to what would happen in Iraq."

What's happened is what she was afraid of.

"Iraq is so big (that) it's diverting our resources from Afghanistan. Had we used those resources in Afghanistan, I think we would have wiped out al-Qaida by this time. That many people would also put a lot more pressure on Pakistan to cough up terrorists.

"... What we're coming around to now is exactly what we had before. Now we have problems on two fronts instead of having resolved one. Both unresolved problems are creating more terrorists. And we have undermined a good image of the U.S. in other parts of the world."

Wright also was concerned about the unnecessary curtailment of civil rights for Americans under the Patriot Act, when the primary need was for cooperation among federal law enforcement agencies.

"We don't know how effective the law is because we have no way of knowing who has been picked up," she said. She said this was the climate in Germany before World War II.

She said the best we can hope for in Iraq is cooperation from other countries and an Iraqi government that acknowledges the three competing political and ethnic divisions — Shiite, Sunni and Kurd — by providing a lot of autonomy for each.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.