With the United States in conflicts against terrorism and Iraq, it's good to see our president spend time on a humanitarian mission - if only he had spent more time there.
President Bush recently ended his five-day, five-country African tour in which he denounced slavery and pledged to fight AIDS and poverty in parts of the underdeveloped continent.
But Bush should have spent more time on the continent in order to better understand the people of Africa and the problems they face.
Rushing through his trip made Bush seem like he wasn't serious about addressing long-standing problems, but wanted to corral voters a little more than a year before the next election. He only spent three hours in Uganda.
After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has been working to fight terrorism all over the world. Under allegations that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, the United States went into Iraq to oust a dictator and liberate a nation.
Considering all this, it should be no surprise most of the world sees Bush as a gun-slinging cowboy who's always looking for his next fight. It's good to see him focus on humanitarian issues for a change.
But for U.S. citizens and the rest of the world to stand behind him, he needs to make sure the world knows he cares about what he's doing.
The most important part of the trip was its focus on AIDS. Not only dud he discuss the AIDS epidemic in his State of the Union address, he asked Congress for $15 billion to fight AIDS in Africa in the next five years.
But one of the biggest issues to come out of Africa recently is something that has yielded little action from the White House or anywhere else on the globe. The Liberian civil war barely made it into Bush's talks. The civil war has killed thousands and displaced as many as 1 million people.
Bush asked Liberian President Charles Taylor to step down. He said African governments and the United Nations would be involved in ending the conflict, according to a New York Times report.
The report also cited White House spokesman Ari Fleischer saying Bush will wait "some time" before deciding whether to send U.S. troops to Liberia, only after receiving a report from the Pentagon.
The White House shouldn't be so hesitant to help people that are truly needy and want our help, like in Liberia; while they are so quick to jump into conflicts like one in Iraq.
If Bush wants to show his critics this trip wasn't just another publicity stunt or photo opportunity, that it wasn't just politically motivated and he can be a leader the world can look up to, he can start by focusing more attention on the problems of a stricken continent.
