A potential deployment of NATO soldiers to Iraq will be discussed during a meeting of NATO ministers in Brussels, Belgium, on Friday which will also mark the admission of seven new member states to the transatlantic alliance.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell, who urged NATO in December to mull an Iraq mission, plans to attend the summit, but has no concrete proposals to place on the table yet, according to Robert Bradtke, the State Department's deputy assistant secretary of state for Europe.

"We're not going to put down a proposal on Friday. Well, we're still looking internally at what NATO might do. We have not decided ourselves exactly what kind of role NATO could play," Bradtke told reporters here.

However, he said 17 of NATO's 26 members already had a presence in Iraq and that the alliance was offering logistical support to the multinational division under Polish command in Iraq.

"We hope to have a good discussion of just what else NATO might do in addition to the support it is providing to the Polish multinational division," the diplomat said.

"There are a variety of options. They range from NATO itself taking over the command of one or both of the multinational divisions to NATO doing things that I would describe as kind of functional.

"For example, training forces, either forces of coalition partners or training Iraqi forces," Bradtke added.

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