The Monday morning schedule for German Defense Minister Peter Struck was planned long ago. His job was to travel to Kabul and steel German forces for their new mission: the co-leadership of the international force assigned to provide security in the dangerous confines of the Afghan capital.

But the Social Democrat had to make a sudden addition to that schedule early in the day. Instead of focusing on the troops' new task, Struck tried to settle a fresh German-American dispute that boiled to the surface over the weekend. The issue is a suggestion reportedly advanced by Germany and France to deploy blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeeping troops into Iraq to help weapons inspectors there.

It is a dispute that Struck helped create. At a high-level security conference held in Munich over the weekend, the defense minister told a public television station that the use of a U.N. force was indeed part of the German-French plan and that it was not clear how many German troops would serve in the force.

On Monday, he corrected himself in a series of interviews.

"Media reports about the deployment of blue helmets and the number of them bear no relation to reality," Struck said in a radio interview Monday.

French play down reports

The correction also came as French officials challenged the German description of the ideas. The French Foreign Ministry said the plan was nothing more than a discussion over proposal that Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin made last week to increase the number of U.N. inspectors in Iraq.

The dispute over the peackeeping plan is one of two issues testing the limits of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as President George W. Bush pushes the United States toward a war with Iraq. The second issue is whether NATO should begin making plans to defend its member Turkey against Iraqi forces during any war launched by the United States. On Monday morning, the second dispute intensified as Germany, France and Belgium blocked the planning, sources in Brussels told the German news agency dpa.

The issue about the U.N. force caught fire Saturday, as military and security experts gathered at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy. The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that German and French leaders had put together the plan. It reportedly would involve tripling the number of weapons inspectors in Iraq, backing them up by sending thousands of U.N. troops and turning the whole of the country into a no-fly zone.

The report irritated U.S. Defense Minister Donald Rumsfeld, an American leader who has singled out Germany for criticism in recent weeks. ``Rumsfeld was here for 24 hours meeting with German and French officials, and no one told him anything. That was not an auspicious start,'' a senior U.S. official told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

In the United States, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell objected to the idea as well. "More inspectors doesn't answer the question and what France has to do and what Germany has to do... is read (Resolution) 1441 again," Powell said on U.S. television on Sunday.

"This lack of cooperation by Iraq and the false declaration, all the other actions that they have taken and not taken since the resolution passed ... all set the stage for the U.N. to go into session and find whether or not serious consequences are appropriate at this time."

Americans question Schröder's policies

U.S. leaders have grown wary of their German ally in light of stands taken by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The Social Democrat campaigned on a peace platform under which he said Germany would not fight any war against Iraq. He strengthened his opposition to Bush last month by saying Germany would also vote against any U.N. Security Resolution that authorized a war on Iraq.

But Schröder has found support from France and Russia, both of which have veto power on the U.N. Security Council. Russian President Vladimir Putin underscored his doubts about any war on Iraq during a brief visit to Berlin on Sunday. "Right now, we don't see any reason to use violence," Putin said before traveling to Paris, where he was to meet with President Jacques Chirac.

Major German-U.S. differences over Iraq

On Saturday, sharp differences between the German and American positions over Iraq surfaced at the high-profile security conference in Munich.

Rumsfeld said in a speech it was hard to believe sensible people could still doubt the threat that Iraq posed in light of the evidence provided by Powell at the U.N. Security Council last week.

Rumsfeld urged the international community to support the military pressure on Saddam Hussein to avoid a war. "If the international community once again shows a lack of decisiveness, then there’s no chance that Saddam Hussein will voluntarily disarm or flee and thus no chance for a peaceful outcome," he said.

Rumsfeld said Iraq had been given years to disarm, and now the world would know within "days or weeks" whether it was cooperating with U.N. inspectors. "He (Saddam) has not been contained, he is successfully getting into that country darn near everything he wants," he said.

Fischer: "I am not convinced"

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer criticized the U.S. strategy and said he couldn’t see any justification for a war against Iraq.

"I am not convinced. That is my problem. I cannot go the public and say that these are the reasons because I won’t believe in them," Fischer said.

The German foreign minister instead said that the U.N. weapons inspectors should continue their work and be given more time to carry out inspections. Fischer turned down Rumsfeld’s demand for a quick decision. "We shouldn’t just follow the logic of a military attack," he said.