UN Security Council members held feverish consultations yesterday to agree on a response to Baghdad's latest denial of access to UN weapons inspectors, branded "unacceptable" by Washington.
The US ambassador to the UN, Mr Bill Richardson, said as he arrived for a Security Council meeting in New York that Iraq's failure to provide officials to facilitate the UN inspection yesterday was "unacceptable and wrong".
"It's a repetition of their past violations, they're snubbing their nose at the UN Security Council," he said.
"We hope in the next few days to push a strong presidential statement supporting UNSCOM and the UN inspection team in full unconditional access."
He said the 15-member Council should express its "clear support" for the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) chairman, Mr Richard Butler, before he heads to Baghdad later this week for meetings from January 19th to 21st with the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Tareq Aziz.
Mr Butler, an Australian diplomat, briefed the council on the latest incident in which Iraq carried out a threat to bar Mr Scott Ritter's inspectors from sites.
Mr Ritter, a US national accused by the Iraqis of being a US spy, said in Baghdad that "the refusal to provide these officers means we cannot carry out our inspection". Without these Iraqi officials, we cannot go to the site . . . We had no choice but to postpone our inspection today."
Iraq had warned that Mr Ritter's 16-member team would be barred from Iraqi sites yesterday unless Mr Butler agreed to change the composition of the team.
Baghdad protested that the team included nine Americans and five Britons, and was unbalanced in favour of two countries which take a hard line on prolonging UN sanctions against Iraq.
Mr Butler said in a letter to the UN Security Council that the 15 inspectors with Mr Ritter did not comprise the entire team, which was also to be drawn from staff in Baghdad and other visiting inspectors.
Western diplomats said that Britain and the United States may push for a statement repeating a warning of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to comply with its obligations to open up all sites to the UN arms inspectors. "If they [the Iraqis] want to escalate, we're going to escalate," said one western diplomat. However, such a response may not be agreed by the other permanent members, China, France and Russia.
Mr Richardson told ABC television on Tuesday: "We're going to try to resolve this diplomatically. But if there's a . . . need for military action, that is something that the President [Clinton] isn't ruling out."
The US Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, telephoned the Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Yevgeni Primakov, following the Iraqi decision to bar Mr Ritter's team.
"Russia is making active efforts to find a way out of the situation that has arisen," a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mr Valery Nesterushkin said in Moscow. But he added: "The organisational and other problems that have arisen must be resolved through dialogue."