Well, we were expecting a lot from Blair's final Guildhall speech. It is his annual foreign policy talk, and this year will be his last one as Prime Minister. Considering he set himself a goal for these final twelve months to find solutions to the problems in the Middle East, we had been expecting more on Syria.

In all there were just a couple of lines. But important ones nevertheless.

Blair seems to be emotionally differentiating between Syria and Iran. They don't share the same interests, he says, they aren't the same, and they require different solutions.

His words come in the week that he will tell Bush to open talks with Syria.

But a note of caution - he made it clear that Palestine, not Syria, is his priority. And talks between Israel-Palestine will come before dialogue with Syria, or a push for Israel-Syria talks.