NYTimes -- The Next Africa?

While we're all focused on distant Iraq, our neighbor South America is quietly falling apart.

Washington's policy toward South America is in disarray, and there has been too little urgency about reaching a new I.M.F. agreement with Argentina. The Treasury, under John Snow, must wake up to its international responsibilities to sustain economic order.

The economic historian Angus Maddison has calculated that in 1900, Argentina's per capita income was almost $2,800, behind the United States then but about the same as Canada and France and more than twice the figure for Japan.

Argentina has been one of the great failures of the last 100 years, for today its per capita income is about $2,500 — that's right, less than it was a century ago. The trajectory is evident in families like that of Eduardo Alberto William, who owes his surname to a great-grandfather who immigrated from England to give his descendants better prospects. It was a bad bet; Mr. William is one of Argentina's 125,000 garbage sorters, who collect recyclables, earning about $2 a day.

With an economy that is shrinking more than 10 percent this year, Argentina defaulted first on its commercial debts and last month on its World Bank debt as well, and even people who manage to get by often support the idea of defaulting.

Iraq is of course enormously important, because we'll probably soon be at war there. But in today's world, as in chess, you can't afford to follow only a single part of the board. If we let Baghdad blind us to other crises and tragedies, if we allow Argentina to slip from the first world to the third world, and are not attuned to the distress of Mrs. Miranda and millions like her, then we — and the South Americans — will be checkmated.