From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

In the months since September 11th, America's popularity in the foreign press has largely

tracked with the successes and failures of its war on terrorism.

Editorialists have variously praised U.S. leadership, questioned its capacities,

castigated its hegemony, and called for its intervention.

However, since President Bush's State of the Union address, with his memorable locution axis of evil,

grouping Iraq with Iran and North Korea, the world press has jointly recoiled.

The reverberations continued this week, compounded by other news.

UPI senior correspondent Martin Walker reads us through Europe and Asia.

Spain's El Mundo, a centrist, even slightly conservative paper. I quote,

the Western Alliance forged after September the 11th has begun to crack. The origin of the

breach isn't in Europe whose solidarity with the United States and willingness to combat

terrorism remain strong,

but with the foreign policy of the American government determined unilaterally to pursue

its private war against evil without worrying too much about the cost for international peace.

What is it about that axis that strikes these editorialists as not sufficiently evil to be worried about.

I think most editorialists accept that there is something particularly shocking and unpleasant

about Iraq itself and about the regime of Saddam Hussein.

What they do seem to ask is, what exactly is it?

And this is a question that was raised in the very conservative and pro-American British telegraph,

...