Now that the New Partnership for Africa's Development has reneged on its original plan to subject the character and quality of national governance in Africa to peer review, the need for a method to improve the way the continent governs itself is more urgent than ever.

If the US persists in enforcing regime change in Iraq, why not do so in every country where the ruler is odious and grossly mistreats his or her people?

"Poor leadership has been the depressing norm in Africa for decades. But as a bold new initiative by a group of past and present African leaders takes off, good governance may finally come to the continent."

Nation-states fail because they can no longer deliver positive political goods to their people.

The economic and political cancer of President Robert G. Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe now promises to spread to South Africa - and so endanger the continent. Zimbabwe's man-made tragedy desperately threatens all its neighbors, and deeply compromises American attempts to help Africa help itself.

ON BASTILLE DAY, July 14, thousands of us, including two prominent senators and a former attorney general of Massachusetts, involuntarily occupied Washington's Reagan Airport. It was a summer's hot Friday. All of us were trying to fly back to Boston for the weekend. But the weather and air traffic control's arcane methods were in the way.

This prosperous-appearing capital city is a modern Potemkin village. Stores and hotels are empty, businesses are shutting their doors, and tourists are absent. Downtown Harare is a lifeless shell following President Robert Mugabe's willful destruction of his nation's economy.

Political leaders, whether the ebullient architects of June's stunning vote in parliamentary elections for the new Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), or the glum Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) followers of Mr. Mugabe, sit in their offices wondering whether the president will change his dictatorial ways.

Last month's elections produced a meaningful opposition for the first time. Of the 120 elected parliamentary seats, 57 went to the MDC, one to an allied party, and 62 to ZANU-PF. Because of widespread intimidation and the likelihood of ballot stuffing and vote rigging, the MDC is contesting 28 of the seats it lost. It won all the cities and all rural areas except those in the president's Shona-speaking heartland. Four of its winners were whites, elected overwhelmingly by blacks despite Mugabe's racist campaign.

HARARE, Zimbabwe Africans prefer participatory democracy to autocracy and honest leadership to corrupt cronyism - those are two of the lessons that can be drawn from Zimbabwe's recent electoral rebuke to President Robert Mugabe's long-unchallenged and economically and politically disastrous rule.

The impending transfer of authority from Zimbabwe's increasingly discredited rulers to a newly empowered grassroots political movement is fueling savage intimidation - killings of black opponents, invasions of white-owned farms, and the assassination of white farmers.

What unites those killed, both black and white, is their support of the Movement of Democratic Change, Zimbabwe's new popular counter to the 20-year rule of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF).

Zimbabwe consequently presents stark choices for the international lending agencies, like the International Monetary Fund, and for policymakers in Washington, London, and the capitals of democratic Africa. The task for Washington and London is to make sure Zimbabwe's next elections are free and fair. International monitoring should only proceed on that basis.