At the Munich Conference on Security Policy back in 2003, Joschka Fischer stared down Donald Rumsfeld and told him what he thought about Washington’s case for invading Iraq.

“I am not convinced. That is my problem,” the feisty German foreign minister told a glaring Pentagon chief.

Five years on, Iraq has dropped down the agenda of this high-profile annual gathering of foreign policy and defence experts, but it still casts a long shadow over U.S. efforts to press its policy in Europe.

This year in Munich, the focus has been on Afghanistan. U.S. officials, spearheaded by Rumsfeld’s successor Robert Gates, have pressed European nations to send more troops there and take a more active role in repelling a fierce Taliban insurgency.

On Sunday, Gates made a case for Afghanistan that might have made even Fischer proud — but Iraq is getting in the way.

“Our mistakes in Iraq have made it hard to convince Europe to do more in Afghanistan,” Lindsey Graham, Republican U.S. Senator from South Carolina told me. “These are two different conflicts but they are lumped together here.”

That’s partly the Bush administration’s fault. It has lumped Afghanistan and Iraq together under the banner of its “global war on terror”.

As long as Bush remains in office, it will be hard for European leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel to convince their deeply sceptical publics that a stronger commitment is needed in Afghanistan.

When a President Clinton, McCain or Obama comes knocking, it may be tougher to resist.

Gen. John Craddock, NATO’s supreme allied commander, Europe, surprised American reporters by using soccer to explain his problems in Afghanistan.

Craddock,  a four-star U.S. Army general, says he does not have as many troops as he needs and too many nations place restrictions on how their soldiers can operate.

“It’s kind of like we’re a soccer team that’s two players short and I can’t move the defenders of midfield to attack and I can’t move the forwards back to defend,” he told members of the Pentagon press corps travelling with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

One American reporter joked he was impressed the Belgium-based commander had been in Europe so long that he could use soccer metaphors.

But Craddock felt the analogy came in handy in explaining his problems to European governments.

“They understand that here. They don’t understand football,” he said, referring to the American game.

As the travelling Pentagon press this time contains a Scotsman and a French reporter, his point was not entirely lost on his audience on Sunday.

It is ironic that one of the world’s foremost gatherings on defence and diplomacy takes place in the city linked to one of the most colossal gaffes in the history of statesmanship.

Perhaps the great and good who make the annual trip to the Munich Conference on Security Policy shudder to recall that here was where major powers signed a 1938 pact with Nazi Germany that merely emboldened Hitler in his quest for European domination.

Yet still they keep coming year after year to spend two days closeted away in a plush Bavarian hotel to pore over today’s security worries, be they the chill in Russia-West ties, transatlantic exasperation, or what to do with Iran.

Launched in 1962, the conference attracts presidents, chancellors, four-star generals and diplomats by the score.

Aficionados know it by the German name “Wehrkunde” — roughly, “defence craft” — and call it the Davos of the defence world because of its pulling power.

By and large, regular attendees — including the hundreds of journalists jammed into a press room so cramped it is like spending a weekend strapped into an economy-class air seat — expect and get a pretty good show.

Last year Russian President Vladimir Putin turned up to unleash a volley of abuse at the United States, accusing it of trying to become the world’s “one single master”.

“I do hope historians in future don’t say another world war broke out here,” Josef Joffe, editor of Die Zeit weekly said at the time in comments that were only partly a joke.

In 2003 German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer stunned the audience with one of the most blunt diplomatic put-downs seen in public, telling U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld he did not believe the case for invading Iraq — barely minutes after Rumsfeld himself stepped up to the podium to present it.

Some credit that exchange itself for contributing to the subsequent downhill slide in U.S.-German relations that are still being repaired.

True, some Wehrkunde events can appear a little formulaic.

The Americans accuse west Europeans of not pulling their weight militarily, who in turn indignantly preach “values” to the Americans.

Then everyone agrees on the vitality of the “Euro-Atlantic partnership” before heading for the beer halls and the sausages.