U.N. weapons inspectors to return to Iraq

"We'll be back under this new dispensation," said Butler, noting it may take months for the U.N. Security Council and member states to approve such a plan and work out the details.

Iraq stopped cooperating with the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, last year, prompting the U.S.-British airstrikes Dec. 16-19 against Iraqi weapons sites and military and command centers.

Since then, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has challenged other U.S. and U.N. controls, including "no-fly" zones Western planes patrol over northern and southern Iraq.

In the latest U.S.-Iraq confrontation, U.S. Air Force planes fired missiles at two Iraqi air defense installations in separate incidents yesterday after determining they were about to be attacked.

The incidents happened at about the same time - 10:45 a.m. Iraqi time, or 2:45 a.m. EST - near the city of Mosul. In the first case, two U.S. F-15E strike aircraft patrolling the northern "no-fly" zone were illuminated by radar from an Iraqi surface-to-air missile installation, said Army Col. Richard Bridges, a Defense Department spokesperson.

The F-15Es fired two AGM-130 air-to-surface missiles in response.

In the other case, a U.S. F-16 fired one anti-radar missile after being targeted by Iraqi radar at a separate air defense installation.

None of the U.S. planes came under Iraqi fire, Bridges said.

It was the fifth "no-fly" clash involving missiles since Dec. 28.

President Clinton has vowed to continue patrolling the "no-fly" zones as part of a strategy of keeping Saddam contained.

The Clinton administration also backs maintaining robust U.N. weapons inspections, although U.S. officials haven't ruled out a revamped UNSCOM.

State Department spokesperson James Rubin said U.N. resolutions requiring disarmament of Iraq before monitoring can begin "can't be leapfrogged."

But he added, "We have always been open to ideas to improve the professionalism, the competence and the effectiveness of the U.N. Special Commission's regime and we will continue to be willing to discuss any such ideas with our partners in the Security Council."

The pre-Christmas U.S.-British airstrikes on Iraq effectively ended UNSCOM's work, which began after the 1991 Gulf War to ensure Iraq destroyed its chemical and biological weapons and most missiles and did not rebuild them. The International Atomic Energy Agency was charged with halting Iraq's nuclear weapons development.

Butler confirmed that all U.N. monitoring of Iraq has stopped, including high surveillance flights by American U-2 spy planes.

But he said he was confident UNSCOM's weapons work would resume, although he said it's not yet clear how that will be accomplished.

"UNSCOM is not dead," Butler said, speaking to a nonproliferation conference sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"We are hard at work designing that future monitoring system."

The U.N. Security Council is considering plans to shift the UNSCOM focus from surprise inspections and aggressive document searches - which have angered Iraq and uncovered Baghdad's efforts to conceal its weapons program - to a less intrusive system that would widely monitor Iraq to ensure it wasn't resuming major weapons development.

Such a monitoring system was supposed to have started only after UNSCOM declared Iraq free of weapons of mass destruction, although Butler said a small monitoring operation began in 1994 for some former weapons sites in the country. U.N. economic sanctions also were to be lifted if UNSCOM determined Iraq had fully disarmed.

Butler said monitoring would be aggressive and maintain UNSCOM's disarmament goals. "It will have to be bigger in scope, range, staffing" than the current monitoring program, he said.

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