Iraq Bars 2 U.S. Arms Inspectors From Reentry

Making good on the previous day’s threat, Iraq on Thursday barred two Americans from returning to their jobs in Baghdad with a U.N. commission investigating Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

The action came amid increasingly heated rhetoric between the Western powers and Iraq, with the U.S. warning of serious consequences and an Iraqi official saying his country was prepared to face a “military confrontation” with the U.S. and its allies.

The two Americans were coming back from a brief vacation in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain, U.N. officials said, when they were intercepted at Habbaniyah airfield about 60 miles west of Baghdad. A third American, working for the International Atomic Energy Agency, was approved for entry by the Iraqis but under instructions from his supervisors returned to Bahrain with the others.

Two other Americans left Baghdad on Thursday on previously scheduled departures as their U.N. tours of duty ended. That left eight Americans on the roughly 100-member U.N. inspection team in Iraq.

The clash unfolded less than nine hours after the U.N. Security Council demanded that Iraq pull back from a Wednesday declaration that it no longer will accept American participation on the U.N. commission. Iraq gave Americans working for the commission in Iraq one week to leave.

Throughout Thursday, Russia, France and Egypt privately spearheaded a vigorous diplomatic effort to persuade Iraq to back down.

The three Security Council members recently have expressed some sympathy for Iraq’s complaints about continuing U.N. economic sanctions, which date from its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. French and Russian companies also have negotiated multimillion-dollar contracts with the Iraqi oil industry that would go into effect once the sanctions are lifted.

But diplomats from those countries were described Thursday as chagrined and embarrassed that Iraq responded to their sympathy by targeting the Americans on the U.N. weapons team. Iraq’s action is considered a breach of the agreement ending the 1991 Persian Gulf War, in which a U.S.-led alliance drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait.

“They [the French and Russians] think they’ve been made to look like fools,” one U.N. official said.

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U.S. officials, however, took some satisfaction in Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s miscalculated attempt to exploit division between the United States and its allies.

“If that was his objective, he certainly once again shot himself in the foot, because he succeeded in uniting the world community in insisting upon compliance,” White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry told reporters in Washington.

If Iraq refuses to withdraw its ultimatum, the Security Council could gradually increase the pressure on Baghdad, a U.N. official suggested Thursday. It could impose travel restrictions on top military officials, as it threatened to do last week. It also could extend the travel ban to other Iraqis, crack down on smuggling that breaks the U.N.-imposed embargo and increase the size of the “no-fly” zones over northern and southern Iraq from which Iraqi aircraft are banned.

Officials in Washington, London and Paris also indicated that military retaliation remains under consideration. “This is a very serious matter, and we are not ruling out any option at this time,” State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said.

But Iraq remained defiant.

“We have not chosen confrontation. . . . We are defending our rights,” Saad Kasim Hamoodi, head of the Arab and International Committee in the Iraqi National Assembly, said in Baghdad. “We are on the defense, but if they [the Americans] pushed the issue toward a military confrontation, we would not be scared of this option and we will not back down from the stand we took.”

Nizar Hamdoun, Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations, said Baghdad was “forced into this decision” by the continuing economic embargo, which Iraq blames solely on the United States.

“We see nothing on the horizon that gives us the hope for a closed end of this,” he said.

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Under terms of the agreement ending the war, U.N. sanctions against Iraq cannot be lifted by the Security Council until the U.N. commission, now headed by Australian diplomat Richard Butler, certifies that Iraq has eliminated all weapons of mass destruction.

For nearly seven years, U.N. inspectors have been tracking down, uncovering and destroying Iraq’s biological, chemical and nuclear weapons programs. But they have been repeatedly thwarted by Iraqi officials, who have filed false reports, harassed inspectors, and hidden and destroyed evidence, particularly about Baghdad’s germ warfare capability, according to U.N. accounts.

Bill Richardson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said Iraq’s ban on Americans “continues a pattern of Iraqi obstructionism that we’ve tried to point out for some time.”

The 100 commission employees in Baghdad are headquartered in a former hotel. Butler suspended all their field activities beginning Wednesday, ordering them to carry out office work.

While the United Nations said it had received Iraqi assurances that there is no threat to the safety of the eight Americans remaining in the capital, it has declined to release any identification of them or any information about the nature of their work with the commission.

Butler has said he will wait until next week to decide whether to remove the Americans. The Iraqis have said they will cooperate with all non-American inspectors.

The Security Council is expected to take up the matter again today.

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Turner reported from the United Nations and Meisler from Washington.