Powell and the former European Union commissioner met Friday in Brussels on the sidelines of a NATO meeting, officials said.

After the fireworks of his relationship with Barnier's predecessor, Dominique de Villepin, Powell told reporters: "I'm pleased to work with Minister Barnier and I look forward to a good relationship with him."

Powell and de Villepin clashed most memorably last year in the run-up to the war in Iraq, when the French minister, speaking in a televised debate at the UN Security Council, passionately denounced the US case for invasion.

But the secretary of state said he had always stayed friends with de Villepin, who was appointed by French President Jacques Chirac as interior minister in a cabinet reshuffle on Wednesday.

"Minister de Villepin and I, even though we had some serious disagreements in the course of our service together, we never lost the ability to talk to each other as friends and as friends with a common purpose to try to get to the right answer," Powell said.

"One thing about a disagreement, if you work at it, you can get over it. I think we're in the process of getting over that disagreement," he added.

"We will see as we go forward what France might or might not be willing to do with respect to a NATO deployment in Iraq once sovereignty has returned to an Iraqi interim government."

Powell admitted that NATO was unlikely to accept US calls to go into Iraq until the country's planned transfer of power from the US-led occupation on July 1.

France has made clear that a UN mandate will also be required before it can even consider joining a NATO peacekeeping mission in the shattered country.

Barnier said NATO involvement in Iraq, beyond logistical support that the alliance is already providing to a Polish division, "is not on the agenda now".

"NATO is not the place where we should be taking decisions about the situation in Iraq after July 1," he told reporters.

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