From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

If one goal of the war in Iraq, according to the Bush administration, is to redefine

mid-east politics, the U.S. may be getting more than it bargained for.

Martin Walker, chief correspondent for United Press International,

says that the war and the emerging

Arabic media are fueling an explosion of pan-Arabism unseen in 40 years.

He joins me now from Kuwait City.

Martin, welcome back to the show.

Hello there.

So the Arab governments, to one degree or another, are mainly in support of the coalition in this war,

but the Arab street seems to be very anti-war and anti-Western.

Tell me what you're seeing in the press.

What I'm seeing is the creation, or I suppose the recreation for the first time since

Nassau in the 1950s, 1960s, of a real pan-Arab nationalist patriotic consciousness.

And I'm seeing this not just in traditional leftist papers or papers of radical governments,

but even in the newspapers of America's friends,

when you read in Al-Aqba, which one knows to be a semi-official newspaper in Egypt,

the evil axis of Bush and the evil forces will not gain their main political objective

from the war to crush the Arabs. The Arabs are rising.

It's really quite extraordinary. I mean,

I was looking at Al-Viyadh, which is the official Saudi government daily. Now, the Saudi government,

...