U.S. Has Right to Use Force in Iraq, Bush Says : Persian Gulf: U.N. team finishes inspections without trouble, but confrontation brews over Shiites in south.

The latest team of U.N. inspectors completed its work in Baghdad without challenge by Saddam Hussein on Monday, but President Bush and other U.S. officials quickly pointed to another war cloud: a brewing confrontation between the U.S.-led allies and the Iraqi dictator over his suppression of the Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq.

Bush warned that “we have the right to use force if necessary” against an Iraqi president who is “brutalizing his own people.” In turn, the threats of U.S.-led military action prompted the Iraqi media to brand Bush “a war maniac,” “a scorpion” and “a criminal.”

Administration officials, who painted a despairing picture of the Iraqi army’s brutal suppression of an insurgency in the south, outlined a plan that could involve sending U.S. fighters into the skies over southern Iraq to shoot down Iraqi warplanes involved in the action against the Shiites.

“If you can end the Iraqi use of air power, you can even the odds,” an Administration official said.

But other officials acknowledged that Iraqi troops could suppress the Shiites without the help of planes. For that reason, a senior official said, the United States and its allies might well choose to adopt an even more aggressive stance that would station U.N. monitors on the ground in Shiite-controlled territory.

But there still are protracted consultations among the allies about what to do. The senior official said that Britain and France are the most supportive of plans to provide air cover for the Shiites. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, he said, also are expected to endorse those plans, although they have reservations about allowing their bases to be used by U.S. combat air patrols over Iraqi territory.

But Turkey, according to an Administration official, has “essentially said” that it would not allow about 70 U.S. fighter aircraft based at its Incirlik Air Base to take part in such operations.

Meanwhile, predictions that a confrontation might occur over the U.N. inspections evaporated in Baghdad when Nikita Smidovich, the Russian leader of the team, told reporters that the Iraqis had not interfered with his work. He said that the inspectors--the 41st team to enter Iraq since the operation began 16 months ago--would leave Baghdad today as planned.

“We have learned things that will be very useful and very helpful now in future inspections,” Smidovich said. The inspectors are looking for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction--which, under the terms of the cease-fire ending the Persian Gulf War, the United Nations is entitled to find and destroy.

There had been speculation that the team might try to enter a government ministry in defiance of Iraq’s pronouncement that all ministries are now off-limits to the United Nations. The New York Times, in an account fiercely denied by the Bush Administration, reported Sunday that the United States had persuaded the inspectors to try to visit a ministry and thus provoke an incident so that Bush could bomb Iraq during the Republican National Convention and revive his flagging reelection campaign.

A senior U.S. official said he understood the team had called off such a visit because of Sunday’s article, the Washington Post reported in today’s editions.

But at U.N. headquarters in New York, Tim Traven, spokesman for the special commission in charge of eliminating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, said the inspectors had not entered any ministries during their 10-day tour and had never intended to do so.

“They were not denied access to any of the sites they sought, and they visited all the sites they were tasked with prior to their departure for Baghdad,” he said.

Planning for some allied reaction against Hussein’s suppression of the Shiites has been going on for some time and was first reported Friday in the Los Angeles Times. The full extent of the repression was revealed a week ago when the Security Council received a U.N. report that accused Iraq of violating human rights by inflicting heavy civilian casualties with its bombing of Shiites hiding in the marshes of southern Iraq.

In discussing the allied response, U.S. officials said that the most likely option is to ban all Iraqi flights below the 32nd Parallel in what would be known as a “no-fly” zone. Because the allies already have banned flights in Kurdish areas above the 36th Parallel, this would allow Iraqi military aircraft a north-south depth of only 275 miles.

“What we’re talking about is basically setting up what we did for the Kurds,” an Administration official said.

Also under consideration, a senior official said, is a broader prohibition of all Iraqi military operations in the Shiite area, far more difficult to enforce than a ban on flights. But the main thrust of recent Iraqi military operations has been on the ground, the official said.

The official cautioned that the imposition of a ban on Iraqi aircraft in the south remains “some days” away. He said, however, that the United States and its allies had agreed in principle to take action unless Hussein abruptly ends military operations against the Shiite insurgents.

“There’s still some sorting out to do,” the official said. “But everyone basically agrees that we can’t tolerate this kind of repression anymore.”

One point of confusion, the senior official noted, is the Iraqi army’s less-than-consistent implementation of its crackdown on the Shiites--a factor understood to make some U.S. allies look at the prospect of a response with some caution.

“It kind of ebbs and flows,” he said. “It hasn’t been systematic at all, and that does make it more difficult to forge some kind of definitive response.”

The lack of Turkish cooperation, another Administration official said, would not significantly hamper plans to act on the Shiites’ behalf.

He implied that U.S. warplanes could monitor the skies over southern Iraq from aircraft carriers and military bases in Bahrain.

Bush said in an interview on CNN that Hussein “thinks . . . he can bluff and bully his way” and that the presidential campaign has caused the Iraqi leader to miscalculate the mood in the U.S. government.

“I think, once again, he is looking at our election--he’s a big CNN listener and he hears a lot of news coverage--and he says, well, the President might not be reelected or whatever,” Bush said, “and I think he’s just trying to thumb his nose at the rest of the world.

“And he’s not going to get away with it,” the President declared. “He is going to abide by these U.N. resolutions.”

Once again Bush displayed anger over the New York Times story.

“I must say that I was appalled at a story that came out yesterday that started suggesting that I would try to have an August surprise and risk the life of an American just for a political purpose,” the President said. “I really was deeply offended by that.”

Bush and several other U.S. officials said the United States and its allies could justify further actions against Hussein based on U.N. Security Council Resolution 688. In that resolution, passed in April, 1991, the Security Council demanded that Iraq end its “repression of the Iraqi civilian population.”

The resolution does not directly authorize the use of force to stop such repression. But U.S. officials insist that the authority was implied by other resolutions ending the Gulf War. As a result, they say there is no need for Edward Perkins, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to seek a new resolution from the Security Council authorizing military force.

“At this point, we don’t anticipate any further Security Council action on this subject,” State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

Times staff writer James Gerstenzang contributed to this report.