■"Walking the Talk: Students and congregations take action on genocide," op-ed by Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times, 9 October 2005, p. A13.

■"As Economy Plummets, Zimbabwe Arrests Street Vendors: Food, gasoline and even seed and fertilizer have become hard to find," by Michael Wines, New York Times, 8 October 2005, p. A3.

Kristof can get awfully moralizing sometime, despite an excruciatingly naÔve appreciation of the military requirements for some of the big bets he asks America to make, like stop being a "wimp" on African genocide.

Easier said than done, my friend, and if you think college students collecting donations for the African Union will do the trick, you're just plain dreaming.

Great to see college kids feeling some sense of moral outrage and thus duty, but they need to get a whole lot more realistic on what stopping genocide in Africa will take. We can't pretend that we're going to send lotsa money to the AU and have them do all the dirty work for us, making sure no American lives are lost in the process.

And let's be even more clear: if we think nation-creating in Iraq is hard, what with all the pissed-off young men running around with arms and bombs, then we're in for an even harsher reality in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, where the effort--and the time involved--will be that much more draining.

You want to stop killing, you better be prepared to do some, and you better be prepared for American troops to do a lot of the killing, because most allies, including local African ones, won't bother showing up with any numbers until the hard stuff is mostly done.

So, great to see the growing outrage among the young and religious groups. I just hope someone's making the connection between the same SysAdmin function we needed for Iraq and the one we'd naturally end up using in Africa to stop or prevent genocide. It's the same force, folks, driven by all the same considerations. Outsourcing this all to the Africans or the Europeans or even the Chinese is not possible. We either lead or no one gets in the way. It's as simple as that.

So, as far as the college youth leader who likes to brag about donating $20 to prevent genocide in Africa (he follows up with the challenge, "What are you doing?), wake me when he's ready to cowboy up for the SysAdmin force, to include carry a weapon.

Because there is business to be done, my friend, all over the continent. Mugabe is making hundreds of thousands of people homeless, putting them on the run in a series of nasty crackdowns coming post his rigged re-election. With seeds and fertilizer growing scarce and skulls getting cracked regularly, watch for Zimbabwe to have its share of starving people next year. Serious percentages of the population will go malnourished this winter, and it will only get worse with time.

Want to prevent that genocide from emerging? Better support your local SysAdmin sheriff. And better be arguing for some Core-wide A-to-Z system for deciding how to unleash the Leviathan that will be required to push that Big Man Mugabe out of office.

Won't be pretty, and $20 won't cover it for the college boys.