U.N. Team Searches Iraqi Ministry : Inspections: Clues to weaponry sought as demonstrators march in Baghdad.

A team of U.N. weapons experts started a systematic, room-to-room search of the unassuming ministry building in downtown Baghdad that brought Iraq near the brink of war, as tens of thousands of Iraqis marched through the streets of their capital Tuesday shaking their fists and shouting, “Bush, Bush, listen with care! We all love Saddam Hussein!”

The chanting in the streets, backed by continued angry rhetoric against the United Nations and President Bush in Iraq’s state-run media, initially alarmed the international team of nuclear, chemical and ballistic weapons inspectors, who arrived in Baghdad from Bahrain on a pre-dawn flight Tuesday morning.

But Iraqi authorities, who barred traffic from many downtown streets to permit the mass demonstration, prevented the marchers from reaching the Agriculture Ministry, site of the search. And the chairman of the special U.N. commission authorized to dispose of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction said later that the Iraqi leadership had promised to protect the safety of his team.

Chairman Rolf Ekeus, who led the small group of European inspectors into Iraq, told a news conference in Baghdad that the cease-fire agreements ending last year’s Persian Gulf War allow U.N. searches in every room of any structure suspected of containing documents or equipment related to Iraq’s ambitious weapons procurement program.

“We intend to use this right,” he said, then quickly added, “but respect Iraqi sensitivity.”

Iraqi police cordoned off the block surrounding the Agriculture Ministry as the search began, barring even the media from watching the exercise, which Ekeus had indicated would be over “very quickly,” presumably within days.

The building had been left unobserved by U.N. personnel for a week after a previous, American-led team of U.N. experts abandoned an 18-day vigil outside the ministry. Pressed on the question of whether the inspectors might find anything of significance left there, Ekeus repeated that his team of “eminent experts” expects to find important leads to any weapons secrets that may have been removed during the week of crisis and negotiations.

“At this time, it’s very important to ascertain and look for the traces,” Ekeus told Cable News Network in an interview in Baghdad after the search team had entered the ministry. “I think we will be able to get at least some clues about what was in there.”

But when asked whether the 11th-hour weekend compromise agreement that finally permitted Tuesday’s search signaled a softening of the Iraqi position on an array of cease-fire controversies, Ekeus took a deliberately hard line. He called the ministry building standoff “a symbol of very serious obstruction from the Iraqi side--an outright breach of Iraq’s obligations under the cease-fire and an unacceptable breach of the cease-fire.”

A similar hard line was evident in the official Iraqi pronouncements that greeted Ekeus and his German-led inspection team in Baghdad on Tuesday morning, an indication that the threat of military confrontation last week has now become a war of words.

Reacting to Bush’s virulent personal attack on the Iraqi leader Monday, when he called Hussein a “bully” and “a merchant of death,” Abdel-Jabbar Mohsen, Hussein’s press spokesman, called Bush a “tunnel-visioned charlatan.”

Denouncing the United Nations, the West and specifically the United States for the fourth consecutive day in the ruling party newspaper, Al Thawra, Mohsen added that Bush “is rancorous, savage, barbaric and cursed.”