U.N.-Iraq Accord Ends Threat of Allied Strike : Persian Gulf: Baghdad agrees to allow reshuffled inspection team into Agriculture Ministry. Bush vows to keep up pressure on Saddam Hussein.

The United Nations and Iraq on Sunday resolved their dispute over access to the Iraqi Agriculture Ministry, ending the threat of an allied air strike, but President Bush warned that the West will maintain pressure on Baghdad until it stops violating other U.N. resolutions as well.

The eleventh-hour agreement, announced jointly by Iraqi authorities and Rolf Ekeus, head of the U.N. commission charged with overseeing Iraq’s disarmament, was essentially a face-saving measure for both sides, involving a modest reshuffling of the inspection team that Baghdad had barred before.

Ekeus and Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, Abdul Amir Anbari, said the pact calls for the U.N. team to resume inspection of Iraq’s weapons archives on Tuesday, with Ekeus present for the entry to the Agriculture Ministry building. The U.N. envoy left New York for Baghdad late Sunday.

But the accord left unanswered the question of whether the Iraqis had relocated some of the archives that the U.N. inspectors initially sought. And it did not even address other Iraqi cease-fire violations that the United States has criticized, such as the army’s recent aerial bombings against Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq.

Bush, returning to the White House on Sunday evening after a weekend at Camp David, Md., grudgingly accepted the accord as a modest step forward.

During a brief press conference on the White House lawn, he contended that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had “caved in” to U.N. demands “after a lot of bluster” and that the three-week-long standoff over the Agriculture Ministry “now has been resolved.”

But Bush also made clear that the United States will not relax its pressure on Iraq until Hussein stops violating a spate of other U.N. resolutions. And he indicated that he would not withdraw the large U.S. military contingent that has assembled in the Gulf region over the past several days.

“Our argument is with Saddam Hussein--the bully, the dictator, the brutal merchant of death,” Bush said. “Behavior along the lines of that we have just witnessed will not be tolerated.” He added that until Hussein complies fully, “there’ll be a lot of tension” between him and the West.

Besides the dispute over entry to the Agriculture Ministry, Bush also listed Iraq’s refusal to negotiate over its post-Gulf War boundaries, to return Kuwaiti property and to end military attacks against the Kurdish and Shiite minorities.

The Administration has been contending for several days that Iraq has violated U.N. demands on a broad range of resolutions. Earlier Sunday, Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser, had described the Agriculture Ministry dispute as “just the tip of the iceberg.”

As a result, senior Administration analysts predicted that the President is likely to order continued pressure on Iraq, both through stiffer enforcement of trade sanctions and through a far more visible allied military presence in the region, to embarrass Hussein.

One analyst conceded that, although the two sides seemed to have struck a compromise in Sunday’s accord, the allies lost some face. “The Administration is going to have to come up with some stuff to make it work or the coalition is going to have problems and lose more ground to Saddam,” he said.

It wasn’t immediately clear how the President’s response would play politically at home. The standoff did give the President a chance to play the role of a commander in chief. However, while the incident marked the fourth time since the end of the Gulf War that Hussein’s defiance has pushed relations with the West to the brink of confrontation, he has yet to pay a military price.

At the same time, the President was in something of a box following the announcement of Sunday’s accord. With Ekeus publicly declaring the crisis over, it would have been difficult politically for Bush to launch an air strike. Many Americans favor such action only with U.N. backing.

The narrowly drawn accord followed four days of intense negotiations between Ekeus and Anbari that involved numerous calls to Baghdad and left Ekeus plainly frustrated over the inadequacy of the Iraqi response. Even Sunday’s assent arrived several hours later than expected.

In essence, the plan calls for replacing some members of the inspection team that previously was laden with Americans, British and French with weapons experts from countries that did not take part in the Persian Gulf War against Iraq in 1991.

Under the agreement, the Iraqis will allow a new six-member inspection team--made up of experts from Germany, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland and Russia--to enter the Agriculture Ministry building to identify the documents that it wants to examine.

The records then will be transported to a second site, where they will be reviewed by a group of weapons experts, apparently including two Americans. Five members of the earlier inspection team who were moved to Bahrain for their safety last week will be allowed to return to Baghdad.

Ostensibly to accommodate Iraqi “sensibilities,” the inspectors will not physically enter the private office of the Iraqi agriculture minister. Baghdad had complained that allowing foreigners to inspect a minister’s office would be degrading and a violation of national sovereignty.

The accord also did not guarantee the safety of the inspectors in the weeks to come. One of the major elements in the Iraqi-U.N. dispute was that the inspectors had been subjected to violence and intimidation, apparently with the government’s approval. The team eventually was forced to move out.

The standoff began July 5, when Iraq barred the U.N. inspectors from entering the Agriculture Ministry building. U.N. officials suspected that the structure was being used to house archives on Iraqi missiles and nuclear weapons production.

Under the provisions of the Gulf War cease-fire accord, U.N. inspectors have the right to examine any records they wish in an effort to ensure that Iraq no longer possesses missiles and other weapons of mass destruction, particularly those involving nuclear, chemical or biological warfare.

For all the satisfaction Iraqi officials expressed with the new accord, Hussein himself seemed to intensify his defiant rhetoric on Sunday, boasting in a radio address that the “mother of all battles”--the term he used for the Gulf War before he was defeated--is still not over.

He also met with his top military and political leadership--members of the Arab Baath Socialist Party and the Revolutionary Command Council--but no decisions were made public, according to a report by the state-run Iraqi News Agency.

The meeting, Hussein’s third Cabinet session in the last three days, was clearly timed to weigh the possible consequences--including a threatened U.S.-led air strike--of Iraq’s steadfast refusal to permit U.N. weapons inspectors inside Baghdad’s Agriculture Ministry building.

Hussein’s declaration, designed to shore up his image in the face of mounting pressure from the West, was almost identical to a similar brief speech he made shortly after his forces fled Kuwait during the allied ground offensive that ended the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

“May you be cherished by God, and may he keep the flag of the principles you fought for in the ‘mother of battles’ always hoisted,” he said, in comments clearly meant for a domestic audience that had been told for weeks that any U.N. searches of the Agriculture Ministry would violate Iraq’s sovereignty.

Hussein’s boast that the “mother of all battles” is still not over drew a sharp rejoinder from Bush. The President told his news conference that “he’d better hope it’s over” because Hussein had suffered humiliation by the West in the eyes of the Iraqi people.

Administration analysts were pensive over the implications of Sunday’s compromise with Hussein. A senior Pentagon Mideast specialist said that while the standoff at the Agriculture Ministry had been defused, the West still will have to “find some way to get him to comply” on other issues.

Pine reported from the United Nations, and Jehl reported from Washington. Times staff writers Robin Wright in Washington and Mark Fineman in Nicosia, Cyprus, also contributed to this report.