From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

This week, President Bush returned from the Middle East, where he has been touring with a three-point agenda, peace, Iran, and oil.

Or, as some may have heard it, Iran, Iran, and Iran.

The week's Susan Kasky has been following the commentaries from a uniformly skeptical,

no, make that scornful, Mid-East and Persian Gulf Press.

Susan, welcome back to the show. Thanks. It's

good to be here. Let's start with Iran. Despite the recent NIE, the National Intelligence

estimate, concluding that Iran halted nuclear weapons research in 2005, the president used his

trip to wave more red flags about what he called the Iranian threat to the region and the world.

How did that go over?

You said scornful. That's a good word to use.

The Iranian press was stressing the entire time that while Bush was touring the region,

Mohamed al-Baradai, who's the head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency,

was actually in Tehran, meeting with a bunch of Iranian bigwigs. And in editorial after

editorial, they're saying we have concluded a new agreement to lay to rest all issues in the next

four weeks, and therefore, you know, Bush is just spouting empty propaganda.

But the interesting thing was that that was echoed in the Arab world.

There were plenty of Arab newspapers that agreed and said, yes, we too think that when Bush says that Iran is a threat, he has no leg to stand on.

And this is interesting because they are in the very region that is presumably most threatened

by Iran's nuclear ambitions.

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