In the coming weeks, the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahayan, is scheduled to fly from Dubai to Tehran, another Arab diplomat seeking to deter Iran's nuclear program.

But on the streets of many Arab states, no deterrence is necessary. In many cafes and barbershops, a nuclear Iran doesn't sound so bad. Neither is the impression that someone is finally standing up to America and Israel.

That someone is President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has deftly turned the issue of Iran's nuclear aspirations against his accusers in the West and won himself a large Arab fan base along the way.

"He is a brave man," says Magdi Radwan, a Cairo teacher, as he watched TV in a downtown coffee house. "He's not afraid of Israel. He's not afraid of the Americans. He's not afraid of anyone."

Plainspoken, aggressive, and backed by vast oil and gas reserves, Mr. Ahmadinejad has inspired and entertained a ready audience of Arabs uninspired by their own leaders – leaders who tend to view the Iranian president with suspicion.

"There is a hunger for leadership in the Arab world, a hunger for change," says Shibley Telhami, an international pollster who is the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland. "Iran is reaping the benefit."

The Arab states are mostly led by cautious, pro-US conservatives, like King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, or by scions who inherited their thrones from charismatic fathers, like President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and King Abdullah II of Jordan.

They are nothing like Ahmadinejad, the stubborn and messianic son of a rural blacksmith. In his constant attacks on Israel – particularly his repeated denial of the Nazi Holocaust – Ahmadinejad has inspired a constituency far from Iran's borders.

"The Holocaust hasn't been as much of an issue in Iran as in the Arab world," says historian Shaul Bakhash. When Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the map, "it resonates much more with the Arabs," he says.

Recent days have seen a quieter Ahmadinejad, as Iran examines a US proposal for direct talks. It would be the first such contacts since the Iranian revolution of 1979, but Tehran has so far balked at Washington's insistence that it stop enriching uranium before they can begin. Iran denies seeking nuclear weapons.

Even as the US and the European Union have increased pressure on Iran, support has continued to grow among Sunni Muslims, even on the Arabian Peninsula, where Shiite Iran has long been seen as a strategic threat.

Still, according to a recent poll of Iran's neighbors by the Washington-based advocacy group Terror Free Tomorrow, one-third of the respondents in Saudi Arabia – where school textbooks depict Shiites as heretics – favor a nuclear-armed Iran. In Pakistan, two-thirds wanted Iran to have the bomb.

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