Bush Decides on Major Iraq Raids if Defiance Goes On : Persian Gulf: Widespread attacks could last several days in an effort to ‘bloody the nose’ of Hussein. Persistent flouting of U.N.’s authority is cited.

President Bush decided Tuesday to deliver major air strikes against Iraq sometime this week unless Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein moves immediately to comply with U.N. demands.

Administration officials declined to comment on the timetable for military action, which would be calculated to deliver a severe blow to Hussein in retaliation for his flouting of U.N. authority since the end of the Persian Gulf War. But knowledgeable sources said an air strike was all but certain, possibly as early as tonight or later this week.

There were indications that the strikes could last as long as several days, involving repeated attacks on missile batteries and airfields, military headquarters facilities in Baghdad and possibly some units of the elite Republican Guard.

Pentagon officials said the operation would be designed not as a hit-and-run punitive action but as a sustained operation intended to “bloody the nose” of Hussein and his military. British and French planes would join U.S. aircraft.

White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater warned again Tuesday that the Administration would no longer issue a warning before taking punitive action. He said Washington is “extremely concerned” about Iraq’s recent provocations.

These included an incident Tuesday in which Iraq sent workmen on a third foray into Kuwaiti territory to reclaim construction equipment stored there, in open defiance of a U.N. Security Council warning. The United Nations condemned Iraq’s actions Monday. The Reuters news agency reported that Iraqi workers returned to Kuwaiti territory today.

Although officials offered no explanation for the delay in any allied military response, they did note that the weather in southern Iraq was bad all day Tuesday, making air operations somewhat more risky.

U.S. officials also disclosed that an Iraqi aircraft had fired a heat-seeking missile at an American fighter Dec. 27 just before a U.S. F-16 downed an Iraqi MIG-25 in the “no-fly zone” over southern Iraq.

U.S. officials interpreted the incident as a sign that Baghdad had given the go-ahead to fire on U.S. jets.

On Tuesday, Nizar Hamdoun, Iraq’s U.N. ambassador, made a last-ditch attempt to enter into formal discussions with the Security Council over a range of issues affecting the U.N.-Iraqi confrontation, but it was unclear whether what he was proposing would win Iraq any delay.

Hamdoun met for 45 minutes with Yoshio Hatano, the Japanese U.N. envoy and this month’s Security Council president. Hatano said later he thought that diplomatic avenues should be explored more fully and that suggestions of a possible attack were premature.

But it was still uncertain if Iraq and the allies would be able to come to terms. Officials said that unless Baghdad agreed to some dramatic turnabout in the next few hours, the attack would go ahead as planned.

Baghdad maintains that Iraq’s incursions into Kuwait over the last four days have been solely to reclaim equipment taken from Iraq during the Gulf War.

The Iraqis insist that the cross-border trips are permitted by U.N. policy, which allows them until Jan. 15 to retrieve their confiscated property.

But the Security Council said Monday that Iraq had not obtained the necessary permit to secure the goods and was in violation of U.N. guidelines.

The United States also has charged that Iraq has been illegally repositioning its missiles in the no-fly zones that the allies imposed in both northern and southern Iraq, threatening allied warplanes that are assigned to patrol the area.

On Tuesday, Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, supreme commander of allied forces in Europe, said the Iraqis had reactivated Soviet-made SA-2 and SA-3 antiaircraft missiles in the area of Mosul, in the northern no-fly zone, and was “going to the brink” in challenging the allies.

Just last week, the Administration thought it had the latest crisis defused when Iraq--rather than face a threatened attack by the allied coalition--pulled its antiaircraft missiles from the no-fly zone in the south, which was imposed to protect Shiite Muslims and other minority groups there.

But tensions between Iraq and the allies rose anew Sunday when Iraq sent a team of armed soldiers and civilians across the Kuwaiti border to recover four Silkworm missiles that had been stored there since the Gulf War.

A day later, Baghdad began reactivating SA-2 and SA-3 antiaircraft missiles that it had moved to the northern no-fly zone in April; those weapons were apparently deactivated after the United States threatened to retaliate.

Analysts said the Security Council statement issued Monday effectively provided a blank check for the United States and its allies to use in justifying their threatened attack on Iraq. The document condemned Baghdad for repeatedly flouting U.N. demands.

U.N. officials charged with monitoring the Iraq-Kuwaiti border said the Iraqi work crews that went into Kuwaiti territory Tuesday were unarmed and sought to reclaim open prefabricated warehouses, window panes and electrical wiring.

A U.N. spokesman confirmed that the Iraqis owned the property and said his agency actually had ordered the Iraqis to remove it before Jan. 15. While confirming that the Iraqis never obtained specific permission, he called Tuesday’s incursion “a very small incident.”

But U.S. officials say it is not only the latest incursions that are the issue but Iraq’s repeated interference with U.N. enforcement efforts over the two years since the end of the Gulf War.

Last month, the Iraqis placed bombs under convoys of allied trucks carrying humanitarian relief supplies to Kurds in the north. They have harassed the Shiite Muslims in the south. And they have interfered with U.N. weapons-inspection teams.

The Bush Administration, clearly frustrated by Iraq’s continuous provocations, has been looking for some time for an opportunity to punish Hussein, and it seems bent on doing so even if it has only a few days left in office.

A knowledgeable source said the U.S. attacks probably would target military airfields, missile sites, radar installations, bunkers, facilities to which U.N. inspectors have been denied access and possibly even the headquarters of Iraq’s air force in Baghdad.

“We’re not looking at one surgical strike,” said one well-placed source. “It would last a couple of days. And once you strike, you can just keep going back again and again.”

Those strikes would coordinate the work of hundreds of aircraft based in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and afloat in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, including F-117A stealth fighter-bombers, F-15 Eagle fighters and F/A-18 Hornets flying off the deck of the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk.

U.S. officials, confronted by what they see as an intransigent and entrenched adversary in Hussein, especially want to escalate allied pressure on the Iraqi military to topple him from power, said the official.

That, in turn, has dictated that an operation would strike at several large Iraqi military installations in an effort to arouse discontent among the Iraqi leader’s security forces, he said.

“We haven’t done a particularly effective job of convincing the Iraqi military that when Saddam Hussein flouts the sanctions, it’s the (Iraqi) military that’s going to pay and not Saddam,” the official continued.

“When that realization comes through, there’ll be a better sense on their part of what they can do.”

In Baghdad, where Hussein and other top Iraqi leaders claimed victory from the latest showdown and vowed to “avenge any American aggression,” there were increasing indications this week that the regime was prepared for yet another round of U.S.-led air strikes.

Senior Iraqi defense analysts declared in a rare moment of military candor on regime-run Iraqi television that the nation’s air force and, specifically, its antiaircraft missile systems are actually better than they were before the devastating Gulf War air raids.

The analysts’ claim, broadcast in round-table discussion format, came after an Iraqi TV announcer read out an eight-page statement declaring that Iraq was justified in continuing its cross-border missions to reclaim its property in a section of the strategic port city of Umm al Qasr that was long considered part of Iraq but now falls in Kuwait under the United Nations’ newly demarcated border.

Times staff writer Mark Fineman in Nicosia, Cyprus, contributed to this report.