"Soon on your screen: The Climatic Apocalypse, gift of the United States," anti-Bush demo, Paris, France. May 26, 2002. Francois Mori

MAY 26, 2002. If the Bush administration had any sense, they would ignore publicly fawning (and privately snickering) European politicians and pay attention to the grassroots protests excoriating the U.S. top dog at every stop of his European tour.

Signalling that the kid gloves are off, after the almost universal sympathy and solicitous handling in the months following 9/11, average Europeans from Berlin to Paris are expressing their now universal disgust at Bush's go-it-alone, do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do policy on everything.

His rejection of the Kyoto treaty on global warming and the International Criminal Court, his bomb and abandon policy in Afghanistan, his fat tariffs on steel imports when he's prying open foreign markets, his selective targeting of Fidel Castro for human rights violations while he's in bed with every other petty tyrant from Uzbekistan to Malaysia, and his preaching of military moderation to Pakistan and India while he pushes for his own arms-race-spurring weapons shield are humiliating America's allies, and reducing talk of human rights and egalitarian principles to little more than hot air.

If 9/11 proved anything, it is that terrorism is not thwarted by a nation standing alone, wrapped in military might. What the U.S. needs, as David Ignatius recently wrote in the Washington Post, is good intelligence, and "friends to help you search."

The only way to win them is to put Bush's fat head on a diet of humble pie.

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