"We don't understand the reason, in each case, why there should be a military popup airfield or something like that to start with," Ivanov told NBC television in an interview in Moscow.

"If we think about terrorism, I understand, as a defense secretary, that the United States needs some transit points on the way for their troops to reach the area of what is now called the Big Middle East.

"I can imagine the need for such establishments, bases, in areas such as, for example, Bulgaria or Romania, but I can't imagine the need for such bases in countries like Poland or Baltic states.

"It's not the Cold War. The Cold War is dead. And we are not competing on an assumption that what is good for you is bad for your partner. We try to build our relations with the United States as a win-win situation," Ivanov said.

In Moscow late last month, US Secretary of State Colin Powell announced plans to establish a series of military bases in former Warsaw Pact countries.

But, in a bid to assuage Russian fears over Washington's intentions, Powell stressed that they would not be big bases and would be used for training or as staging areas for responding to "dangerous crisis places" in Central Asia, the Gulf and the Middle East.

Turning to Iraq, Ivanov said the US-Russian disagreement leading up to the war needs to be laid to rest.

"Here, there is no irony and no effort to gloat on the United States' failure to find such weapons of mass destruction," he said.

"Because we still presume that, theoretically, those weapons could have been in place during Saddam. But if so, where they are now? Were they passed to some other country or hidden? Or maybe some terrorists laid their hands (on them)."

He said the US administration's credibility may have been damaged to some extent by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the peg on which President George W. Bush hung his case for launching the war.

"But that's not the most important issue right now," Ivanov said. "The most important issue is Iraq itself. We have to come to some sort of interim local government, and after that, I think it will be much easier when the UN is there, to start an international project of aiding Iraq, helping Iraq to come from the ruins."

Asked about relations between Washington and Moscow, Ivanov gave a sunny outlook, saying: "We survived Iraq, by the way. Nothing serious happened.

"We have some contradictions, but strategically, we won't get back to the situation of the Cold War. Never. I believe that."

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