By Ken Kobayashi, The Honolulu Advertiser

U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka easily won a fourth term last night and promised that his first priority when he returns to Washington, D.C., will be the war in Iraq.

A longtime critic of the war who has called for U.S. troops to be withdrawn by July next year, Akaka said he will be working with his colleagues in the Senate to develop a comprehensive plan for the war-torn country.

He said he wants the White House to deploy more than Defense Department employees to help Iraqi civilians survive the three-year-old conflict.

"What they (the Bush administration) should be concentrating on is what this country needs to do," he said. "I want to bring people other than defense people to Iraq to bring assistance to the people."

Akaka survived a tough challenge by U.S. Rep. Ed Case in the September Democratic primary ??€" in which the senator's age became an issue ??€" but the 82-year-old Akaka said he has no intentions of retiring before the end of his six-year term.

"We have so much to do," he said. "My spirits are high; my health is good, at least my doctors tell me that, and I'm looking forward to serving."

U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye appeared at Akaka's headquarters at the Dole Cannery ballroom and said if Democrats take control of the Senate, Akaka would be chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, which has jurisdiction over most programs for the nation's 24.5 million military veterans.

Akaka would also again push for the bill named after him seeking federal recognition for Native Hawaiians. He said if Democrats take control of Congress, the Akaka bill has a greater chance of passing.

"I intend to bring it back up again in the Senate," he said, probably in February or March after the reorganization of the House and Senate.

Cynthia Thielen, the GOP replacement for former candidate Jerry Coffee, who gained the most votes in the Republican primary after he withdrew from the race, faced an uphill challenge. She entered the race late and amassed only a small fraction of the more than $2.7 million Akaka raised for his re-election bid.

In late October, her campaign said she had raised approximately $270,000.

Thielen was optimistic after the early return showed her garnering about a third of the vote, more than any other challenger to a Democratic U.S. Senate incumbent in Hawai'i, but after the second set of returns, she told her supporters at Cinnamon's Restaurant in Kailua that she was proud of her campaign and what they had accomplished in six weeks.

She said she called Akaka and congratulated him on his win. Thielen, a moderate Republican, said she asked him to make renewable energy a priority.

The "senator agreed he would do that," she told supporters.

Thielen said her work isn't done and she plans to continue working toward renewable energy at the state Legislature. She said she was proud that her supporters ran a clean and vigorous campaign.

Akaka served 14 years in the U.S. House before he was appointed in 1990 to the Senate to replace the late Spark Matsunaga. Akaka won his first Senate race that year, which allowed him to serve the four years left on Matsunaga's term, then two other six-year terms before his victory last night.