U.N. Condemns Iraq After 2nd Border Raid : Persian Gulf: Security Council warns of ‘serious consequences.’ White House weighs its options.

The U.N. Security Council on Monday condemned Iraq for pressing a policy of provocation, in which Baghdad’s latest move was to send about 150 unarmed workers across the Kuwaiti border to dismantle warehouses on a former Iraqi naval base.

The Monday raid, in which no one was injured and not a shot was fired, was the second such incursion in two days into the U.N.-patrolled demilitarized zone. It occurred half a mile from the border munitions dumps, where 200 Iraqis in civilian dress spirited away missiles and arms on Sunday.

Both actions, the Security Council said, violated the U.N. cease-fire resolutions that ended the U.S.-led war to drive Iraq out of Kuwait two years ago. Council members described the seizure of the weapons as tantamount to “clear-cut defiance by Iraq” and warned Baghdad of the “serious consequences that will flow from such continued defiance.”

The condemnation came in a statement that Japanese Ambassador Yoshio Hatano, who is serving as president this month, read on behalf of Security Council members in New York.

Final approval of the statement was delayed for hours while Edward J. Perkins, the American U.N. envoy, on instructions from Washington, reportedly tried to persuade the other members to strengthen the wording.

The added wording requested by the United States and accepted by the other members accused Iraq of taking part in a “pattern of flouting Security Council resolutions.” This had the effect of broadening the condemnation of Iraq.

Although presidential statements such as the one issued Monday night on Iraq represent a consensus of members’ views, they do not have the force of Security Council resolutions and are not regarded as legally binding on U.N. members.

The statement did not detail the “serious consequences” in store for Iraq if it continued to defy the United Nations. But Hatano, the Associated Press said, told reporters that he did not “foresee a use of force by the United Nations immediately.”

In Washington, the White House was weighing its options, with many private military analysts convinced that the Bush Administration would launch punitive air strikes against Iraq after the Security Council acted.

President Bush met with his top national security advisers, and White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater declared that the United States stood ready to act “without warning” to force Baghdad into compliance with U.N. demands.

Pentagon officials declined to speculate about what action the Administration might take, particularly whether it would order military strikes any time soon. But they said American forces were poised to launch attacks.

Analysts predicted that Washington would launch air strikes against such Iraqi military targets as airfields and communications centers, chosen specially to achieve maximum political embarrassment for Iraq with little risk to American aircraft.

Military experts said the United States could use both sophisticated attack aircraft and Tomahawk missiles. The Tomahawks, launched from Navy ships, can seek out specific targets and damage them severely without endangering pilots.

The United States has surface ships and submarines in both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and it has Air Force jet fighters and attack planes at bases in nearby Saudi Arabia.

U.S. officials said reports from American spy satellites showed that Iraq has moved most of its combat aircraft to airfields in or around Baghdad and had repositioned many of its antiaircraft missiles around Basra, a stronghold of opposition elements in the country.

One official said the Iraqis had even parked some warplanes in the streets alongside Baghdad’s airports, presumably in an effort to escape allied attacks on the airport landing strips themselves.

CIA Director Robert M. Gates told Reuters news agency on Monday that Iraq has begun shifting antiaircraft missiles into “no-fly zones” imposed by the allies in both the north and the south but said it was too early to tell whether they pose a threat to allied aircraft.

“There’s still a lot of activity moving around . . . surface-to-air missile batteries, both north (of the 36th Parallel) and south (of the 32nd Parallel),” Gates said. “We’re waiting to see how that all settles out.”

Anthony Cordesman, a Georgetown University military expert, said Iraq’s Presidential Guard, Republican Guard and special security forces are scattered throughout the country, often in large concentrations where they would be extremely vulnerable to aerial bombardment.

There was little doubt that the Administration was taking the latest Iraqi provocations seriously, particularly after last week’s episode in which Baghdad briefly moved antiaircraft missiles into an allied-patrolled “no-fly zone,” withdrawing them only after threat of military force.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein “got a fire going” with last week’s missiles incidents, “and now he’s sprinkling gasoline on it,” one senior U.S. official said Monday. He said Baghdad was “clearly breaking new ground” in defying U.N. demands.

Don Snider, military specialist at the well-connected Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies, said experts there were interpreting the Administration’s behavior so far as suggesting that some sort of U.S. military action was “imminent.”

He said the main reason for having the entire Security Council, rather than simply the allied coalition, condemn Iraq was so that Baghdad could not easily portray the U.N. condemnation to other Arab states as nothing but a Western action. The United States and Iraq “are both playing to the same audience” of Arab states, Snider said.

In Little Rock, Ark., President-elect Bill Clinton once again expressed his support for the Bush Administration’s policies on Iraq. George Stephanopoulos, Clinton’s communications director, said Iraq “must know that . . . we will not tolerate any violations.”

The two border Iraqi incidents came just after Baghdad announced it would attempt to stop U.N. aircraft from ferrying in teams of international weapons inspectors authorized to neutralize Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical arms programs--an order that coincided with Iraq’s 11th-hour decision to reposition its missile batteries.

The missile batteries, U.S. officials said, were in striking range of American fighter jets patrolling the southern third of the country as part of a no-fly zone imposed by America, France, Britain and Russia to protect Muslim Shiites.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali earlier on Monday declared that Baghdad’s moves “cast doubt on Iraq’s willingness to cooperate” with the international body.

Hussein, who was shown on national television meeting with chiefs of his air force and air-defense network, made no official statement on the border incursions. But Nizar Hamdoun, Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, cast them as little more than procedural misunderstandings.

The warehouses and weapons are Iraqi property that the U.N. Iraq-Kuwait Observers Mission--which has been monitoring and helping demarcate the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border since the war’s end--had told Baghdad to remove from the demilitarized zone by Jan. 15. Hamdoun said there were just “misunderstandings” between U.N. monitors and Iraqi border authorities.

In an interview, Hamdoun said: “It was all Iraqi property, and it was all non-prohibited under 687 (the Security Council resolution requiring Iraq to give up its weapons of mass destruction). So I don’t understand what the big deal is about it.”

He insisted in other statements that the Iraqis who crossed the border were civilian contract workers hired to fetch Iraq’s possessions before the deadline expires. He also defended Iraq’s order that U.N. weapons-inspection teams use Iraqi Airways charters, rather than their own aircraft.

U.N. troops on Sunday tried to stop the Iraqis from taking the weapons--including four, not the previously reported 15, Chinese-made, anti-ship Silkworm missiles. Sills stressed that the weapons that Iraq took were Iraqi property; they were, however, supposed to have been destroyed.

Fineman reported from Nicosia and Meisler from Washington. Times staff writer Art Pine also contributed to this report from Washington.

THE CLINTON FACTOR: Is Hussein planning to test the President-elect? World Report