The American president's scathing attack against Iran the previous day resonated throughout the region, including in powerful Saudi Arabia, whose media Monday emphasized Saudi policy on Iran and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by saying that Saudi leaders would relay their message and vision to Bush instead of heeding to the president.
In a keynote speech in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, Bush described Iran as "the world's leading sponsor of terror," saying Washington "is strengthening our longstanding security commitments with our friends in the Gulf, and rallying friends around the world to confront this danger before it's too late."
He accused Tehran of seeking to "intimidate its neighbors with missiles and bellicose rhetoric," claiming that its "actions threaten the security of nations everywhere."
But Iranian officials seemed confident that Bush's attempt to muster support against the Islamic republic would be futile in the Arab states, which have adopted a policy of "calm rapprochement" to avert any possible threat emanating from Iran's growing political influence in the region and from its nuclear program.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that Bush would be unable to damage Tehran's ties with its Arab neighbors, and denounced his tour, which started in Israel Wednesday, as a "failure."
Despite the UAE's dispute over three islands it says are occupied by Iran, Emirati officials and the media downplayed Bush's attack on Iran, with some privately saying that his confrontational remarks did not represent the views of the Gulf Arab countries.
Bush was received warmly by leaders in Riyadh, which enjoys tremendous political and financial influence in the region and Muslim world. The Saudi stop is seen as the most important in the U.S. president's tour, which has also taken him to Kuwait and Bahrain.
But the Saudi leadership, which boasts close ties with the Bush family, was not likely to budge closer to Washington's position on Iran and Israel.
Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal made his country's position regarding Iran clear ahead of Bush's visit and before his warning speech on Iran in Abu Dhabi.
"Saudi Arabia is a neighbor of Iran in the Gulf, which is a small lake," Faisal said. "We are keen that harmony and peace should prevail among states of the region."
Saudi diplomats told the Middle East Times that the monarch is aware of the potential threat that Iran poses in the region with its nuclear program, and its political leverage in war-torn Iraq and crisis-hit Lebanon and Gaza.
But the king would advise Bush against trying to escalate a confrontation with Iran, because of his conviction that Iran's nuclear program -- which Tehran insists is only for civilian energy purposes -- remains a lesser threat than Israel's undeclared nuclear arsenal and a military confrontation.
The diplomats stressed that Saudi Arabia would urge Bush against using the region to settle Washington's scores with Tehran and to rein in Israel's escalating rhetoric to allow dialogue to succeed in averting a confrontation.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, parroting Bush's policy, reportedly said Monday that Israel is "not ruling out any option … to prevent Iran from nuclear capability."
On the Arab-Israeli front, the Saudi monarch is expected to decline Bush's call to "reach out to Israel," an appeal he made at the end of his three-day visit to Israel and the West Bank last week when outlining his vision for a Palestinian-Israeli peace accord that he says can be reached before his term expires in January 2009.
King Abdullah is expected to reiterate that the Saudi-proposed Arab peace initiative of 2002 would remain the basis of a solution to the conflict. The initiative, endorsed by the 22-member Arab League and revived last year, offered full relations with Israel in return for its withdrawal from the territories it occupied in 1967 and the establishment of a Palestinian state there.
Saudi officials say that there will be no normalization with Israel except in line with its initiative, which they say is based on U.N. resolutions that have been ignored in Bush's proposals for a peace deal.
In addition to courting Riyadh's diplomatic clout in the region, U.S. officials indicated that Bush would also seek Saudi financial influence, which "could make an enormous difference in places like the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and other locations."
Yet Arab commentators doubted the king would agree to paying the bills solely on behalf of U.S. policies that are widely regarded in the region as pro-Israeli and as having destroyed Iraq.