Ann Wright doesn’t
seem like the type to make trouble. As an Army colonel trained in Special
Operations and 26-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service, she’s
been a team player most of her life. She’s served under Republicans
and Democrats -- some of whom she supported, others she did not -- in
many isolated and dangerous nations: Afghanistan, Somalia, Sierra Leone,
Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Nicaragua, Grenada and Panama. Through it all,
Wright believed it was her duty to serve the American people, including
their president-elect and his policies.
She learned to put
aside her personal views, or to state them quietly within the proper
channels and continue on with her work. Wright and others in the Diplomatic
Corps also knew how to use the system to stymie “loony tunes”policies.
“Internally, there are ways lightening bolt programs can be slowed,”
she explained. “That gives the Administration time to ponder what
they’re doing.”
But when President George W. Bush invaded Iraq without the support of
the United Nations or many in the State Department, Wright just couldn’t
stuff her outrage and dismay.
“I felt the timing was wrong,” said Wright, who helped re-open
the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan after America waged retaliatory strikes
following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. “I
knew first hand how much we had to do to get the security environment
under control in Afghanistan. It made no sense to divert resources to
Iraq. And there was nothing in the security documents that made us feel
we were in imminent danger from Iraq. I knew this was going to go very,
very wrong.”
Other Bush policies also were giving Wright “heartburn,”
including his stand on the Israeli-Palestine conflict, North Korea’s
nuclear build-up and“the unnecessary curtailment of civil liberties”
domestically. “It seemed like it was my responsibility to America
to sacrifice my career to expose these dangers that I saw not only to
our country, but the whole world.”
So on March 19, 2003, Wright tendered her resignation, as did two other
diplomats. Forced to quickly leave her post in Mongolia, she returned
to Oahu, where she lived briefly in 2002 while on special assignment
with the State Department to help Hawaii host the controversial Asian
Development Conference. The Arkansas native had bought a condo in Honolulu
then, thinking “it might be a nice place to live someday. I just
didn’t think someday would come so soon.”
Wright suddenly found herself with time on her hands and decided to
throw her indignation, passion and energy into the presidential campaign,
an activity previously prohibited to her as a federal employee. She
started by supporting Howard Dean, but easily switched to John Kerry.
“The way I’m looking at it is anybody but Bush.”
Since her resignation, Wright worked tirelessly to dethrone Bush. She’s
done more than 55 interviews for radio, TV, magazines and documentaries,
and spoken to groups around the nation, where she’s “thrilled
by the outpouring of concern. There certainly is an angst in so many
people of America about what’s going on.”
Still, she said, “Bush’s senior advisors have been writing
about going into Iraq for many, many years, so it shouldn’t have
been a surprise to anyone that we went into this. If you look at the
backgrounds of the people in this Administration, it is all about oil,
although they’ll all deny that.”
The central issue is whether the U.S., “as the world’s sole
super power, needed to be aggressive in using its leadership to eliminate
governments we didn’t agree with through pre-emptive strikes.
Other leaders who did this were tried for war crimes. But we have the
biggest military. We can beat anybody up so we’ll never be brought
to trial. It’s kind of how they look at it.” That attitude
has severely tarnished America’s international reputation, she
said. “I don’t think the rest of the world will ever trust
George Bush.
And they shouldn’t fully trust America because we do go off on
tangents and don’t always stand behind those who stand behind
us. I think we can regain a sense of trust.... our moral stature, but
we’ll have to start by getting rid of George Bush.”
Many Americans “have a sort of blind spot” about how the
nation’s policies affect others, in part because life is so easy
and they tend to be ignorant about world affairs, she said. “And
unfortunately, a lot of people just don’t care.” Wright,
on the other hand, said her “heart just bleeds” for Iraq
because both the war and reconstruction were handled badly. “The
responsibility for rebuilding was given to the Department of Defense
and not the State Department, which is just crazy. (Defense Secretary
Donald) Rumsfield forbade his military officers from even reviewing
the huge numbers of documents on reconstruction.prepared at the State
Department .”
She’s also concerned because Bush has no realistic exit strategy
for Iraq. “It’s really, really dicey. We can’t leave
now that we’ve stirred up such a hornet’s nest and eliminated
a lot of the security forces that could have maintained some order.
We’ll have to keep large numbers of military troops there for
a long time to come, and that’s not good because we’ll be
a lightening rod for attacks. You might as well paint a big bull’s
eye on it (the American embassy) because every rocket in town will be
trained on it.”
Defeating Bush is the first step in cleaning up the mess, she said,
so she plans to spend a lot of time on the mainland in upcoming months
“helping out wherever I’m needed.” Come Election Day,
she’s encouraging island residents to cast absentee ballots then
serve as poll watchers in Florida and other swing states where many
voters were disenfranchised in 2000.
“Everyone must be vigilant,” she warned. “There’s
a potential for a lot of crooked things to go on.”
When the election is over, Wright likely will focus on local issues,
including the continuing military build-up in the islands. “As
a citizen of Hawaii, I would be speaking out very strongly against increasing
the amount of training space in Hawaii. There are other ways you can
move and train troops without disrupting the remaining unique places
in the world. It’s more expensive to train elsewhere, but that’s
OK. That’s why we pay taxes.”
Wright was
most recently the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Ulaanbaatar,
Mongolia. She helped open the U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, in
January 2002. The
following is a copy of Mary (Ann) Wright's letter of resignation to
Secretary of State Colin Powell.
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