U.N. to Send Inspectors to Iraq Today : Persian Gulf: Visit will test Baghdad’s assurances. Allied planes patrol ‘no-fly zones’ without incident.

The United Nations said Wednesday that it will send a team of weapons inspectors to Iraq today, after new assurances by Baghdad that it will allow U.N. aircraft to land and that it will guarantee the inspectors’ safety.

U.N. officials said the 70-member team will include a 25-person chemical weapons destruction unit, led by an American, Paul Brough. Baghdad had denied the group permission to land last Friday but capitulated Tuesday as part of a “goodwill gesture” toward Bill Clinton.

The announcement came as the Pentagon reported that Iraq made no move to challenge allied warplanes patrolling the southern and northern “no-fly zones,” upholding its pledge to avoid any confrontations during Wednesday’s inauguration of President Clinton.

Defense Department officials said that U.S. planes flew routine patrols over the two zones but encountered no Iraqi antiaircraft artillery fire or missiles. In contrast to the situation in recent days, they said, Iraqi planes did not try to penetrate the no-fly zones.

Turkey announced Wednesday that the United Nations had briefly halted relief convoys to Kurds in northern Iraq because of skirmishes earlier this week between Iraqi antiaircraft gunners and allied warplanes. A spokesman said a 50-truck convoy had been turned back from a point near the Kurdish town of Faida after Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint fired in response to sounds of Iraqi antiaircraft fire. No further details were available.

U.S. officials said that whether the U.N. inspection team is permitted to land in Iraq will be the first test of Baghdad’s offer to begin a new dialogue with the West now that Clinton has replaced George Bush as President.

In Brussels, Iraqi Ambassador Zaid Haidar told Reuters news agency that his country is ready to “normalize” relations with the United States. He again invited the U.S. Congress to send a delegation to Baghdad.

In Washington, Clinton did not mention the Iraqi standoff in his inaugural address. Earlier, he was briefed by Brent Scowcroft, Bush’s national security adviser.

The new President offered little encouragement that the allies’ dispute with Iraq is likely to be resolved soon, at least as long as Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is in charge and continues to flout U.N. authority in the wake of the Gulf War.

In an interview with CBS, Clinton said he thought it “almost inconceivable” that Washington “can have good relations with Iraq with him (Hussein) there because he has given no indication that he is capable of being a reliable member of the community of nations.”

Clinton also reaffirmed his intent to step up U.N. intervention in Bosnia. He said he realizes it would be more difficult for allied forces to help in Bosnia than in Somalia but he asserted that “this idea of ethnic cleansing”--the Serb practice of brutally ejecting non-Serbs from Serb-controlled areas--must “be nipped in the bud.”

Hussein showed Wednesday that he would remain an irritant to Clinton, ordering the reconstruction of a factory--said by U.S. officials to be a nuclear weapons-fabricating plant--damaged in an attack by U.S. cruise missiles near Baghdad last Sunday, the Iraqi News Agency reported.

Meanwhile, the United States’ major U.N. allies split Wednesday over whether the Bush Administration had overstepped the boundaries of U.N. resolutions in its attack Sunday. In the most serious such statement, French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas accused the United States of having exceeded its authority and asserted that France had refused to participate because it objected to the U.S. action.

But in London, British Prime Minister John Major disagreed with Dumas, asserting that Sunday’s cruise-missile attack was “wholly justified” and arguing that the only reason France and Britain did not participate was that only the United States had the missiles. He said that both Britain and France had been consulted before the attack was launched.