U.S. Embassy’s Water, Power Cut Off by Iraq : Gulf crisis: Troops keep pressure on Kuwait compound. Allied ships are prepared to use force to carry out the U.N. resolution on embargo.

Iraqi forces cut off power and water to the besieged U.S. Embassy in Kuwait Saturday as U.S. and allied navies in the region readied their guns to enforce a new U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force to block all shipping to and from Iraq.

U.S. officials said the embassy’s electricity was severed about 1:15 a.m. PDT and water was shut off sometime later. Telephone service was sporadic, but embassy officials continued to maintain some contact with the estimated 2,500 Americans trapped in Kuwait.

About a dozen armed Iraqi troops who took up positions around the U.S. Embassy compound Friday were blocking entry and exit from the buildings but had not attempted to enter the grounds, the State Department said.

U.S. officials said the embassy was operating on a single gasoline-powered generator that provided only limited cooling power. “It leaves us hot and dry,” one official said. The officials said they did not know how long the gasoline would last or the extent of the embassy’s water reserves.

A source involved in managing the crisis said the Iraqis had shut off only one of two water mains that supply the building. But the remaining water main spewed out dirty, sludge-filled water, and the Americans had to turn it off themselves, the source said.

Despite Iraq’s provocative actions at the embassy in Kuwait, the Bush Administration appeared content with passage early Saturday of the historic U.N. resolution for which the United States had lobbied heavily for a week. Neither the White House nor the Pentagon indulged in the kind of belligerent language that has marked Administration statements of recent days.

In the Persian Gulf, the northern Arabian Sea and the Red Sea, U.S. Navy vessels and ships from several other nations continued to shadow about a dozen Iraqi commercial ships, prepared to halt them by force if they attempt to unload their cargo.

Pentagon sources said two Iraqi oil tankers were being watched particularly closely because they were nearing ports but noted that no action to interdict them was likely until late today at the earliest.

The warships were operating under a new mandate from the U.N. Security Council, which overwhelmingly authorized the use of military force to back up a stiff trade embargo levied on Iraq in the wake of its military takeover of Kuwait on Aug. 2.

The resolution permits “measures commensurate to the specific circumstances . . . to halt all inward and outward maritime shipping.”

The resolution made no mention of air traffic. U.S. officials said Friday that some military supplies and other goods continued to arrive in Iraq from Libya and unspecified other nations, but that no military action would be taken to interdict the air shipments.

U.S. military officials said no new orders had been issued to naval commanders in the region as a result of the U.N. action. Rules of engagement for U.S. warships issued earlier allow progressive enforcement measures, beginning with radio warnings and ending with sinking a suspect ship if the U.N. embargo is violated.

National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, in a television interview, declined to detail rules governing the use of force to halt shipping. He said only that American vessels will use “the minimum amount of interference with traffic in order to make the sanctions effective.”

The Security Council action provided further international justification for measures the United States was prepared to take unilaterally, Administration officials said.

Among those nations with military vessels in the region or on the way are Britain, France, the Soviet Union, the Netherlands, Australia, Spain and several Persian Gulf states.

U.S. Navy officials are trying to establish cooperative relationships with the other naval powers, both to avoid accidents and to give any enforcement action a clear international cast.

“It’s not a multinational force in the formal sense. There’s no central command structure,” one senior Pentagon official said. “It’s cooperative, but I can’t say now exactly how that will play out in practice.”

Naval commanders in the region are working out informal zones of responsibility, as they did during the tanker escort operation in the gulf in 1988, Navy officials said.

The Pentagon announced that planes from the 48th Tactical Fighter Wing were being deployed to Saudi Arabia from their base at Lakenheath in Britain. The wing flies F-111 aircraft, long-range bombers that were used in the 1986 U.S. raid on Libya.

In Washington, Iraq ‘s ambassador said the wives and children of American diplomats who fled Kuwait to Baghdad will be allowed to leave Iraq, but the diplomats will be kept as hostages.

Administration officials protested the action as another example of Iraqi duplicity. Baghdad had promised that the 100 U.S. Embassy personnel, Marine guards and dependents who left the embassy in Kuwait on Thursday would be allowed to leave Iraq through Jordan or Turkey.

Summoned to the State Department for another U.S. protest, Iraqi Ambassador Mohammed Mashat told reporters, “We are on the brink of a catastrophe. . . . American lives are being risked for no reason whatsoever.”

The Iraqi diplomat said “we are not going to use force” against the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait, where Ambassador W. Nathaniel Howell and a staff of about 10 defied Iraqi orders to shut down by Friday.

“We haven’t touched any embassy there,” the Iraqi said at an impromptu news conference at the State Department after a brief session with David Mack, a deputy assistant secretary of state who had called him in.

In his televised interview, Scowcroft said that seizing the U.S. and other embassies was “very counterproductive.” He warned Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to “refrain from any action against” the Americans and other foreigners held in Kuwait and Iraq.

Scowcroft added that while Bush is deeply concerned about the fate of the estimated 3,000 Americans trapped in the two countries, the President would not alter his policy solely to save their lives.

“That will not be the case,” Scowcroft said. “The hostages are on the President’s mind constantly, and (in) everything we do, we will think about the hostages. They will not divert us, however, from our strategy.”

The Voice of America radio service advised the 2,500 Americans trapped in Kuwait not to go near the embassy while the Iraqi soldiers remained, even though there appeared to be no attempt to take over the compound.

The State Department broadcast on VOA said the embassy was “determined to continue working for your release from Kuwait and your safe return to your families.”

In an apparent effort to flush out Americans and other foreign nationals who may be in hiding, Iraq threatened to hang anyone caught providing shelter for foreigners in either Iraq or Kuwait.

“Anyone who shelters a foreigner with the aim of hiding him from the authorities will be committing a crime of espionage,” the Iraqi government said in a radio broadcast monitored by Reuters. “He will be hanged for such a crime.”

Following a marathon U.N. session that ended after 4 a.m., U.S. Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering called the vote “one of the most important decisions in its history.”

“Iraq has evaded resolutions of the Security Council and thumbed its nose at all humanity,” Pickering said. “This is not an act of war, but an enforcement of sanctions which have been flagrantly violated.”

The five permanent Security Council members are the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, China, and France. The 10 other current members are Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Ethiopia, Finland, Ivory Coast, Malaysia, Romania, Yemen and Zaire.

Yemen and Cuba were the only countries that abstained from the Security Council vote. Yemen’s ambassador, Abdallah Saleh Ashtal, warned that any military action backing the sanctions might lead to war.

Yemen, meanwhile, said it was fully complying with the U.N. embargo and would refuse to allow Iraqi tankers to unload oil at its terminal. At least one Iraqi oil carrier, the Khanaqin, is anchored off the Yemeni port of Aden, having been denied permission to discharge its cargo.

The White House said the Security Council vote “further strengthens the world resolve to force Iraq out of Kuwait.

“The resolve of the international community is strong. The vote exhibits the commitment of the world to act effectively to achieve the complete, immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait,” White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said.

Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, Abdul Amir Anbari, immediately denounced the Security Council vote and said it could lead to war.

“This use of force by the United States or any of its allies or puppets will lead inevitably to a number of explosions which will burn all in their path,” he said at the United Nations in New York.

Times staff writer Douglas Jehl contributed to this report.

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