“The march toward war certainly seems like it’s on the move.”
Ann Wright was a co-organiser of the No to NATO, Yes to Peace conference held in Washington, July 6 and of the rally that took place in front of the White House on July 7
- International, USA
Can you present yourself?
My name is Anne Wright. I’m a retired U.S. Army colonel. I was in the U.S. military 29 years. I was also a U.S. diplomat. I was in the diplomatic corps 16 years and served in U.S. embassies in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone and Micronesia.
I helped reopen the embassy in Afghanistan in 2001. I was in Mongolia when I resigned from the government in 2003. I felt the Bush war on Iraq was illegal and immoral and even though I had been in the government for 35 years with a lot of other immoral, illegal things the U.S. government had done, I went ahead and resigned.
I was one of three U.S. diplomats who resigned over the war on Iraq.
And since then, you have been advocating for peace?
Yes, and since then I’ve been working with all sorts of organizations like Veterans for Peace, World Beyond War, Code Pink Women for Peace, Peace Action.
How do you see the next step to try to stop the spiral of the march to the war in Europe and in Asia?
The march toward war certainly seems like it’s on the move. What we are doing here to try to alert citizens about the dangers from NATO is one part of our attempt to get the U.S. and citizens all over the world to say to their governments : we do not want war and we don’t want more money given to our militaries that prepare for war.
We want the money to go to the needs of the people, not to kill people. The education part of this is very, very important. Also, street demonstrations are very important.
We will have demonstrations while the NATO chiefs of heads of countries are here. We’ll be out in front of the Washington Convention Center where the heads of the NATO countries will be. And we appeal to citizens all over NATO countries to be having demonstrations at the same time.
Will some unions join these demonstrations or is it only organized by the peace movement?
It’s primarily organized by the peace movement, but we ask for all sorts of organizations to join. We are organizing from the peace community, but we would encourage every part of our society to have demonstrations.
Here in the United States, we have not too many unions that have been joining with us. We have had some of the dock workers in Oakland that have refused to unload ships from Israel. But the main labor unions have not been active in this, which is terrible because we need them.
The automobile workers have made some positive statements about stopping the genocide in Gaza. But as far as actually coming out and marching with us and being in the streets, we really haven’t seen that.
It’s interesting what you mentioned about the port workers of Oakland, because in Europe we have met several times with the port workers and dockers of Genoa in Italy. They have blocked the shipment and transit of weapons and organized big demonstrations against the war.
I suspect they may know each other already with the Oakland port workers, because there are so few that have taken such a good dramatic step. But we definitely would want to help with that connection.