The following editorial appeared Tuesday in the San Jose Mercury News.

President Bush is sending Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the United Nations to lobby for a rapid response to the agreement to end genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. Without immediate Security Council action, the pact between the largest contingent of rebels and the Sudanese government will probably fall apart, as so many cease-fire agreements in that region already have.

Bush deserves credit for helping to broker peace by telephoning Sudan’s president directly when talks had broken down, and by dispatching Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick to the negotiations at a critical moment. While encouraging, the peace accord is but the first step toward ending a humanitarian crisis that has claimed upward of 250,000 lives and created 2 million refugees. U.N. peacekeepers are needed in the region to translate Friday’s peace commitment into protections that people in Darfur can trust.

Sudan’s president agreed to allow U.N. troops into the region, where they will back up 7,000 African Union monitors. That under-equipped force has been unable to check violence by marauding Arab militias aligned with the Sudanese government against non-Arab Darfur natives.

Without a push from Rice, it would take the United Nations six months to get its troops on the ground – a disastrous delay. The past three months have seen some of the most vicious attacks on villages by the Janjaweed (translated as “devils on horses”), resulting in the flight of a quarter-million more villagers. On Monday, there were riots in the largest refugee camps.

A quicker deployment should be doable, considering there already are 10,000 U.N. troops in southern Sudan, keeping the peace under a separate treaty. Their quick reassignment also could induce two rebel factions that walked out of the talks last week to fall into line.

The involvement of the West, in conjunction with the U.N. deployment, will not be without risks. Osama bin Laden has called on al-Qaida loyalists to go to Sudan to fight the United Nations.

This week, Bush also pledged to ask Congress to grant $225 million more in food assistance for Darfur and to order emergency shipments to the region. Short of money last week, the U.N. food program cut rations at overcrowded refugee camps by half, creating new levels of fear and misery.

The failure of donor nations to keep food in the pipeline was unconscionable. Bush’s challenge, now that he at last has made Darfur a priority, will be to persuade other nations to act with urgency.