PARIS: American efforts in getting Nato to play a major role in peacekeeping in Iraq will be hampered by continuing divisions in the alliance over the wisdom of the war and concerns that its troops are already overextended on missions elsewhere, according to Nato diplomats and defence analysts.

Officials said it is unlikely France, Germany or other members such as Belgium would agree to a large Nato role in Iraq as long as the United States is the main occupying power and the political transition remains in the hands of the US civilian administrator, L. Paul Bremer.

The dispatch of French troops “cannot be envisioned except in the context of a United Nations peacekeeping force, based on a clear mandate of the Security Council,” French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said in an interview published on Thursday in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro. “For us, it would be fitting that the political transition in Iraq be placed under the responsibility of the United Nations.”

France, along with fellow Nato members Germany and Russia, led the opposition to the war in Iraq. The dispute became particularly bitter within the meeting rooms of Nato’s governing Atlantic Council, leading to one of the deepest crises in the alliance’s 54-year history.

But, with US troops in Iraq taking fire on a daily basis, the Senate on Thursday passed a resolution calling on the United States to court Nato for help. Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the administration will be discussing with its allies “whether there is a broader role the alliance can play.”

European analysts saw little chance of success in the near term. “I don’t think anybody is going to jump into an American- run quagmire,” said Francois Heisbourg, director of the Paris- based Foundation for Strategic Research and a noted military affairs expert. He said, “I don’t imagine this happening without a transfer of political authority to Sergio Vieira de Mello,” the UN special representative in Iraq.

On May 21, Nato agreed to provide limited assistance to member country Poland in running an international occupation force in a sector of Iraq. The plan is for 9,200 troops from such other countries as Spain, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, as well as several Latin American countries. Some are already in Iraq. Nato’s role is assist with communications, transport and intelligence.

Some US and Nato officials would like to see that limited assistance expand into a much wider role — a senior official in Brussels from one Nato member called it “highly probable” that the alliance could take over Iraq peacekeeping duties by the fall of 2004, despite the reluctance of other countries. The model, he and others said, is Afghanistan, where Nato has been helping an international peacekeeping force and is about to assume full command of it. But even if consensus were reached for a big Nato role, the problems Poland has had in assembling even a small force points to a big constraint — a lack of deployable troops.

Nato member countries’ forces are already stretched thin with peacekeeping operations in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Two of Nato’s best-equipped and most modern armies are on duty in trouble spots in Africa — the French in Ivory Coast and Congo, the British in Sierra Leone.

“The idea that somehow there’s a great surplus of deployable troops in Europe is not true at all,” David Wright, Canada’s long-serving ambassador to Nato and the dean of the Nato diplomatic corps, said in an interview.

“The whole international community is facing a challenge of a lot more peacekeeping, peace-building, g, nation-building type exercises,” Wright said, and all such operations require “a mandate, money and soldiers — and all of these things, relative to demand, are in short supply.” He added, “with the demands elsewhere — the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa and so on — we don’t want to promise things we can’t deliver.”—Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.