THE most senior US military commander, Gen John Shalikashvili, has said he would be "very happy" to see Ireland involved in NATO's Partnership for Peace (PFP).
The general, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff and a former supreme allied commander in Europe, was replying to a question from The Irish Times about his views on Ireland being one of the few European countries not involved in the PFP.
The partnership allows participating countries to devise their own form of co-operation with NATO, but without assuming any mutual defence obligations.
"As a military officer and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, I'm almost afraid to answer that for fear I would start some international incident, he said. "From my perspective as one of the authors of PFP, I would be very happy to see Ireland in a PFP. There are others who might see some political issues her&, but for me it is a matter of patterns of cooperation."
The general explained that the PFP allows countries to "practise together during periods when we do not need to go on operations 59 that they will work more effectively when they are in joint operations.
"It is quite conceivable that Ireland and NATO countries would find themselves in operations, whether it is in Rwanda or some place else, and it would be so good if prior to such an event that we had opportunities to work together . . . as military forces."
The Government has said in its Foreign Policy White Paper that it is considering joining PFP, but Fianna Fail has expressed strong opposition because it would mean involvement in a nuclear alliance and could be seen as an abandonment of traditional neutrality.
The general, who was speaking at a USA Today breakfast for foreign correspondents in Washington, spoke strongly in favour of NATO extending its operations to peace-keeping and humanitarian missions outside of Europe.
He said that when the current crisis broke in Rwanda and Zaire, he discussed involving NATO with the Secretary for Defence, "but in the end the view was that NATO was so involved in Bosnia that it should not be saddled with another mission".
He favoured NATO being able to operate in the Middle East and Africa and said that the debates several years ago about "out of area operations for the alliance is "not now such a hot issue".
Asked whether he favoured specialist peace-keeping forces for use in such missions, Gen Shalikashvili said he was "very opposed to them". He was "absolutely convinced from the operations that US forces were involved in, that the most competent peace-keeping force is one that first and foremost is made up of the most competent soldiers, who on top of that are given the orientation necessary to deal with the complexities of a peace-keeping operation."
The general, nicknamed "Shali" was born in Warsaw in 1936 and still speaks with a trace of a foreign accent. His father, Dimitri, was a Georgian serving in the Polish cavalry when the Germans invaded Poland. His mother, Maria, was the daughter of a Russian general.
After the Polish surrender, his father fought with a Georgian unit in the German army under SS commanders because he believed that a German victory over the Soviet Union would lead to freedom for Georgia.
The family emigrated to the US in 1952. He joined the army in 1958 and served in Vietnam. As deputy commander of the US forces in Europe in 1991, he attracted favourable attention for taking charge of Operation Provide Comfort to save the 500,000 Iraqi Kurds who fled into northern Iraq and south-east Turkey at the end of the Gulf War.