Now he goes to London to make a speech!

President Bush’s visit to “fortress London” to meet with Tony Blair and speak to the British public on why war against Iraq was justified comes a year too late.

Today Bush is met by 100,000 protesters in the streets, the wittiest toppling a statue of Bush in effigy in Trafalgar Square. The spectacle of such public disgust from citizens of our chief ally in the Iraqi war is depressing enough. The need for presidential security in London that rivals what Bush would need if he visited Baghdad is stunning.

But imagine if Bush had gone to European capitals last fall, rather than this fall. Imagine if he and Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld had made a fraction of the effort that Bush’s father’s team made in 1991, when they shuttled to Europe constantly in the run-up to Desert Storm, to assemble the bona fide coalition that made that conflict a triumph of diplomacy as well as military might.

Please note that I raise these points as a “Tony Blair Democrat” – one who supported taking Saddam out but who can’t understand why Bush didn’t go the last mile to pull together the coalition that was always plainly necessary for the post-Saddam environment. Indeed, Bush didn’t even go the first mile.

Yes, he made that speech in September 2002 to the United Nations. But the key blind spot in Bush’s global outlook was that public opinion in Europe mattered also – not for toppling Saddam, for which U.S. military power always sufficed, but for rebuilding Iraq in ways that wouldn’t have left the effort an exclusive U.S. responsibility, easily cast as an imperialist adventure.

We’ll never know if strenuous efforts to persuade the European public would have worked. We only know they weren’t tried. Why not?

Why didn’t Bush fly to Paris and make a major public address on why the United States viewed military force as necessary, in order that the resolutions of the United Nations and the free world were not

mocked and exposed as hollow?

Why didn’t he say that he understood that Europe’s bloody history and newly integrating political culture gave the continent a different view of the legitimacy of force as a way to solve international problems? And that while he empathized with the history that had bequeathed this antipathy to force, he nonetheless felt that his duty to protect America impelled him to view the risk of inaction against Saddam as greater than the risk of acting?

Why didn’t Powell and Rumsfeld fan out to Berlin and London and Istanbul with similar messages – generating national coverage and debate in which American officials would have been seen respectfully making the case to allies whose views were deemed relevant and worthy of persuasion? Why instead did Rumsfeld simply dismiss “Old Europe” in macho fashion and assert (wrongly, in the long run) that we could go it alone?

Why, in a word, didn’t Bush lead?

When I raise such “what ifs” with die-hard Bushies, they say quietly that it might have been a good idea. But in the next breath they add it may not have changed the result – that France and Germany in particular would still have stonewalled.

But in that case, there’s every difference in the way President Bush and America would have been viewed. Bush wisely spoke in his 2000 campaign about the need for humility in foreign policy. Going to war after such a high-profile European tour aimed explicitly at persuading Europeans would have left Bush in a very different position. He could have said justly that we made every effort to have you join us – and though we disagreed, we respected you enough to try to persuade you, and to make sure you understood why we felt it so important to act.

My suspicion is that Bush and his team would have perceived the course I suggest as a sign of weakness. In truth it would have been a sign of strength.

Now, as we see on our TV screens, Bush is reaping the wages of arrogance. That deposing a brutal tyrant like Saddam Hussein could be cause for global revulsion against America will surely go down as one of the most profound diplomatic failures in history.

Matthew Miller is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Reach him at:

www.mattmilleronline.com.