Air Strike Threat Scorned by Iraq : Persian Gulf: Deputy premier says nation ‘will never abandon its sovereignty,’ won’t open Agriculture Ministry to U.N. inspectors looking for missile records.

Iraq escalated its confrontation with the United Nations on Thursday, asserting that it will not admit U.N. inspectors to its records-laden Agriculture Ministry building despite threats of military intervention by the United States, Britain and France.

Bush Administration officials said that Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed President Bush on military options against Iraq, as Pentagon officials cautioned that the resurgent Iraqi air force could pose a new threat to allied planes.

At a press conference in Baghdad reported by the Iraqi News Agency, Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz told reporters that Iraq “will never abandon its sovereignty and will never accept any insult and will never allow a U.N. inspection team to threaten its internal security.”

He said Iraq “is sticking with its rejection stand concerning any demand that will involve an insult to Iraq.” And he warned that “the Iraqi people and Iraqi command are ready to face all consequences,” apparently including a possible air strike by the West.

The hard-line Iraqi stance intensified frustration among the Western powers and prompted the Bush Administration to step up its warnings to Baghdad, with the Pentagon announcing that it has canceled a scheduled visit to Greece by the aircraft carrier Saratoga, freeing it for possible duty near Iraq.

A day after U.N. inspectors left Baghdad, stymied in their efforts to look for ballistic missile records in the Agriculture Ministry, Pentagon officials said that one critical impediment to a military strike has been removed. With the inspectors gone, Iraq has been stripped of its ability to take a team of international hostages if violence erupts.

But knowledgeable American officials said the Pentagon sees new dangers in any military action against Iraq. They confirmed that Iraq, in its first postwar use of warplanes in combat, flew a small number of sophisticated bombers and jets against Shiite Muslim rebels north of Basra, in the marshes of southern Iraq, earlier this week.

The use of warplanes for both combat and patrol missions reflects a recent upsurge in combat training for the Iraqi air force, officials said. And Pentagon officials have warned that a U.S. air strike could face greater dangers than in the year that followed Iraq’s defeat in the Gulf War, when training flights were halted completely.

One official noted, “Their ability to fly airplanes is coming back, although it is not what it was before the war.”

Iraq’s air defense network has also been substantially rebuilt in recent months, according to officials.

Presidential press spokesman Marlin Fitzwater emphasized Thursday that the White House meeting and the cancellation of shore leave for crew members of the Saratoga were intended to send a signal to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

“The first message should be that he should get in compliance with the U.N. (cease-fire) resolutions and allow these inspectors the access they need,” Fitzwater said. “The message should be that we’re very serious about this, and it’s not a matter that he should put off.”

Dozens of Air Force F-15E fighter-bombers, radar-eluding F-117 fighters, A-10 attack planes and electronic jamming planes remain at bases throughout Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, where they are within striking distance of Iraq, Pentagon officials said. On Tuesday, Navy officials said that an armada of 37 warships, including the carriers Saratoga and Independence, are in the region.

Meanwhile, the prospect that Bush might face serious domestic political pressures if the United States launched a military strike against Iraq was eased substantially Thursday as Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton announced that he would support Bush in any such endeavor.

At a news conference in Little Rock, Ark., Clinton told reporters: “Let there be no mistake: If the U.N. decides to use force to ensure Iraqi compliance” with the cease-fire resolution, “. . . I will support American participation in such action.

“Even during an election campaign, Americans are united on this issue,” the Arkansas governor added. Hussein, he declared, “should understand that we will not tolerate his defiance of U.N. resolutions.”

Clinton, however, appeared to rule out any action aimed at forcibly removing Hussein from power.

“That’s not part of the U.N. mandates--eliminating him,” he told an interviewer in Houston. “Controlling him is.”

Clinton’s support was viewed as important. Political analysts had warned that the President could end up in a political box if a strike against Iraq proved insufficient or unsuccessful.

The situation at the United Nations remained fluid Thursday. The Security Council met briefly to review conditions in the former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina but skirted any talk about Iraq.

The Security Council president, Jose Luis Jesus of Cape Verde, told reporters that U.N. authorities had offered a “compromise” to Iraq that proposes allowing the inspectors to enter the Agriculture Ministry in small groups, but diplomatic sources said it was unlikely that Baghdad would agree.

There are increasing indications here that if the major powers do decide to intervene militarily against Iraq, they will do so on their own, relying on previous resolutions of the Security Council without seeking any new U.N. authority.

David Hannay, the British ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters after Thursday’s session that “there’s no need to write more Security Council resolutions” because “all the Security Council resolutions that we need are (already) in place.”

Diplomatic sources say the allied effort to win broad support for a new U.N. ultimatum to Iraq apparently has run into trouble. Without the kind of urgency that accompanied Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, many Security Council members have been lukewarm to the proposition.

The increasing defiance by Iraq of U.N. demands that it open its Agriculture Ministry has lent credence to some analysts’ theory that the stance reflects a fundamental change in Iraq’s relations with the West from the days just after the Gulf War.

Although Hussein has tested Western resolve before, he consistently has backed down once he sensed that he was approaching a serious confrontation with the United States and other major powers. But this time he has continued to defy U.N. demands.

U.N. officials have insisted that they have a right to enter the Agriculture Ministry because they believe it is laden with archives on ballistic missiles used to help replenish the Iraqi arsenal, along with details of how Iraq is averting some of the trade sanctions imposed by the West.

But Iraq denies that it is hiding anything and maintains that the issue is simply a question of national sovereignty.

Pine reported from the United Nations and Murphy from Cairo. Times staff writers Melissa Healy and Douglas Jehl in Washington and Cathleen Decker in Houston contributed to this article.