Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said achieving Middle East peace in 2008 looked unrealistic because the United States would be preoccupied with the presidential election. Syria attended last month a Middle East conference in Annapolis, which re-launched formal peace talks aimed at reaching agreement on Palestinian statehood by the end of 2008.
"It is perhaps too late to talk about peace in the last year of this U.S. administration. It will be preoccupied with elections," Assad said in an interview with Austrian daily Die Presse published on Wednesday. "Annapolis was a one-day event. It will all depend on follow-up efforts. We have to be optimistic, although cautious."
Syria said the Annapolis meeting, attended by other Arab countries, revived its bid to recover the occupied Golan Heights from Israel. According to Assad, his country and Israel went 80 percent of the way towards peace in talks on the Golan in 2000, before the talks collapsed.
"Now a referee is needed. The United States above all, naturally with support from the EU and U.N.. But without the U.S., nothing will work," he was quoted as saying.
He conveyed U.S. policy in the region was changing in form although not yet in substance.
The Syrian leader also said that Damascus would not allow the US to marginalize his country over its alliance with Tehran. It is not possible to stabilize the Middle East without Iran's cooperation, al-Assad said in the interview with the Austrian paper.
The US makes efforts to isolate Syria over the country's objection to the Iraq war, al-Assad added. Regarding Syria's support for Hamas and Hizbullah, the Syrian president said that peace and stability cannot be established in Palestine without Hamas as it is a powerful movement, just as Hizbullah is in Lebanon.
Additionally, he disclosed Syria rebuffed a possible approach in 2001 from Pakistani-led traffickers in nuclear arms technology. Assad said an unnamed person delivered to Syria a letter purportedly from A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's atom bomb who supplied Iran, Libya and North Korea with nuclear parts and know-how.
"At the beginning of 2001 someone brought us a letter from a certain Khan. We did not know if the letter was genuine or a forgery by Israel to lure us into a trap," Assad conveyed. "In any case, we rejected (the approach). We were not interested in having nuclear weapons or a nuclear reactor. We never met Khan."
