AFRICA CALLING.

As President Bush ventures into Africa, a passage from the opening pages of V. S. Naipaul's novel "A Bend in the River" comes to mind. It's the moment when the narrator, Salim, after driving for days from the East African coast into the interior of the continent, recalls, with a hint of dread, the counsel of an old friend: "You can always get into those places. What is hard is to get out."

Bush turned to Africa in shoes heavy with the dust of Afghanistan and the sands of Iraq. He has no apparent exit strategy for either of those countries, which he got into, for better or for worse, with a spirit of avenging justice and a conviction that the national interest was at stake. His mission in Africa is different. It appears that he was drawn to the continent, which has figured only marginally in the Administration's strategic considerations (as an occasional battleground in the war on terror and as an alternative source of oil), precisely because he might more easily have continued to ignore its woes and its challenges. No sitting Republican President has made a state visit to sub-Saharan Africa before, and, in laying out his agenda in a speech to the Corporate Council on Africa, on June 26th, Bush made it clear that he saw the continent not as a threat but, rather, as an opportunity to prove himself as a champion of oppressed and abused humanity. He sounded like a missionary, preaching a gospel of African uplift through entrepreneurship, market reforms, and free trade, and at the same time pledging his support for efforts to end the seemingly incessant agony of war, hunger, disease, illiteracy, and corruption endured by vast numbers of Africans. He singled out the desperate plight of Congo and of Sudan; he declared that President Charles Taylor of Liberia "needs to step down so that his country can be spared further bloodshed"; and he expressed a desire to see the Zimbabwean tyrant, Robert Mugabe, relinquish power as well. But Bush was careful not to say what, if anything, America might do to protect Africa's most brutalized people; he merely expressed solidarity in a spirit of noblesse oblige. "We believe that human suffering in Africa creates moral responsibilities for people everywhere," he said. "We recognize a moral duty to bring hope where there is despair, and relief where there's suffering." And he avowed, "Our nation has more than a set of interests; I believe we have a calling."

The President could not have imagined that his words would immediately be put to the test, and that even before he left for Africa he would be forced to consider whether to send American troops into Liberia at the head of a multinational peacekeeping force. Since 1989, when Taylor emerged as one of Africa's most ruthless and relentlessly destructive warlords, the country has been devastated by virtually non-stop civil war. He has ruled by rapaciousness and caprice, preying not only on his own people but also on his West African neighbors, sponsoring campaigns of butchery in Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and Guinea. In recent years, as international sanctions began to sap his strength, Liberian rebel groups pressed their advantage; and in June, when a U.N.-sponsored war-crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone indicted Taylor on charges of crimes against ...