Germany opened the door on Saturday for Nato to take a stabilisation role in Iraq, but voiced serious doubts and ruled out deploying its own troops.
Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer - returning one year on to a security conference at which he had clashed with US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over Washington's plans to invade Iraq - said Berlin felt vindicated in its opposition to the war.
"Germany feels that events have proven the position it took at the time to be right," he told the conference in the German city of Munich. "We were not and are still not convinced of the reasons for war."
Rumsfeld was again in the audience on Saturday, but Fischer took a conciliatory stand on the need for Europe and the United States to work together for stability across the Middle East.
"Regardless of our opinion of the war, we have to win the peace together because otherwise we will lose together, we have to look forward," he said.
The United States and several other allies are keen for the 19-nation Nato alliance to take command of a Polish-led force of some 9,000 troops in a swathe of south-central Iraq after sovereignty is returned to the people of the country on July 1.
But they are not pressing hard for fear of rekindling tensions over the war, which triggered one of the deepest crises in the alliance's 54-year-old history, and diplomats say a decision will be delayed until Nato's Istanbul summit in June.
France and Germany, Europe's fiercest opponents of the invasion to topple Saddam Hussein, are the most reticent about putting the alliance into Iraq. Paris has made it clear that it would seek a new resolution - or at least formal backing - from the UN Security Council to launch such an operation.
MISGIVINGS: Fischer said his government "will not stand in the way of a consensus, even if we don't send German troops to Iraq", but followed that with misgivings.
"The risk of failure - and the possibly very serious and potentially fatal consequences for the alliance - must be taken into consideration," he said. "Honesty demands of me that I do not conceal my deep scepticism."
He said Nato, many of whose nations say their armed forces are stretched by missions across the globe, was right to make its peacekeeping operation in Afghanistan the priority and should not leap into another difficult task.
His tone was less strident than a year earlier when he rejected Washington's justification for the Iraq war.
Fischer said on Saturday that the West could not fight terrorism by military means only and that widening democracy in the Middle East was a more important question than whether or not Nato became involved in Iraq.
But former US Defence Secretary William Cohen, one of the participants in the conference, said that if Germany accepted that Nato could have a role in Iraq as an ally it should consider sending its troops there.
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