As the Serbian atrocities mounted this spring there was a moment when President Clinton was pushing NATO to send in troops, but at that point the Croatians suddenly turned and started attacking the

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Muslim population, too, as if to say to the conquering Serbs, "Never mind us, let's team up on the new kid!" When that happened, outside confusion about which side was the victims reached a peak, and Clinton was unable to muster support for Western intervention.

There has been speculation (not only from Muslim groups but from, for instance, Richard Nixon) that the West is not willing to defend Muslims from genocide as it would Christians and Jews.

Adam's already at the studio when I arrive. "I half heard you on the radio just now," I say to him in the sitting room. "Tell me we're not going to Bosnia."

"No, no," Adam says. "We can't, we've got this tour! We're involved in funding this caravan of supplies that's going in, but we're not going ourselves. They asked me to come down and speak this morning, to help them get publicity for it. That's all."

"That's a relief," I say. "I checked my airport travel insurance. It's void in a war zone."

Adam says very seriously, "I think, though, if we didn't have the tour I would go along. We all sit and watch this stuff on television and say, 'Why doesn't somebody do something?' I think if you have the chance to check it out, you must."

When you read that in a book it might sound like hot air, but when Adam says it to me in a room in Dublin it's not, it's entirely sincere. If he were free of his obligations to the others I believe Adam would be willing to risk his life not out of the sort of religious passion Bono musters but out of an old British sense that this is simply the proper thing for a man to do. There is something contradictory in Adam, who, as Bono says, has been thinking that he's now middle-aged since he was twenty, but who is also like a little boy determined to show that he will not be afraid, he will not be denied, he will do whatever must be done and make no fuss about it. When you first meet U2 you think that Adam has the most understandable personality of any of them, but eventually you realize that he is the most complicated. He registers everything; I think he feels everything. But he shows almost nothing.

Contrast that with Bono, who shows what he's feeling in his face, what he's thinking in his words, and what he had for breakfast on his shirt. Bono does not disguise his complexities. I go into the control room and Bono is hammering at the Powerbook personal computer that has become his salvation after a lifetime of losing his lyrics.

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"So hard to watch the news from Bosnia," Bono says. "It was hard not to feel accused. A relief worker was looking at me, at each of us, saying, 'You are a jerk for doing nothing.' It made it very hard for me to consider working on this"—he gestures at the studio around him— "important."

He reads me what he has been writing:

I read a book once, called "In Cold Blood" About a murder in the neighborhood Pages of facts did me no good I read it like a blind man, in cold blood So the story of a three-year-old child Raped by soldiers though she'd already died Made the mother watch as they fucked her in the mud I'm reading the story now in cold blood More now coming off the wire City surrounded, funeral pyre Life is cheaper than talking about it People choke on their politician's vomit On cable television I saw a woman weep Live by satellite from a flood-ridden street Boy mistaken for a wastepaper bin Body that a child used to live in I saw plastic explosives and an alarm clock And the wrong men sitting in the dock Karma is a word I never understood How Cod could take a four-year-old in cold blood I live by a beach but it feels like New York I hear about ten murders before I get to work What's it going to be, Lord, fire or flood An act of mercy or in cold blood?

"I'm thinking of reciting it on the album with just a drum," Bono says. "Bring in a note of brutal reality. Do you think that's too much?'

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