United States Foreign Relations Iraq

Secretary-General Kofi Annan is resisting Washington's attempts to make him the point man in the latest confrontation with Iraq and has no immediate plans to intervene in the increasingly tense impasse, officials here said Monday. Annan's reluctance to take on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein over Hussein's decision to halt cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors undermines the revised American strategy on Iraq and has contributed to the disarray in the U.N. response to Baghdad.

Directed by Congress to pursue more vigorous efforts to bring down Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the Clinton administration has responded with a detailed, 27-page plan to rebuild Iraq's shattered political opposition and prepare a case for a possible war crimes indictment of Iraqi leaders.

Faced with a fresh reminder of Iraqi intransigence, the Security Council on Thursday unanimously rejected any easing of economic sanctions against Baghdad but remained divided on any further action. The council decision followed a gruff dismissal by Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz of an overture from chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler.

One of the most senior U.N. weapons inspectors resigned Wednesday after charging that the United States and U.N. officials have opted to "surrender to the Iraqi leadership" in the ongoing confrontation with Baghdad. The resignation of Scott Ritter, a retired U.S.

The noisy resignation of a senior U.N. arms inspector put the Clinton administration on the defensive Thursday, as it sought to explain an Iraq policy that critics assail as a new soft line toward a dangerous regime. Faced with deepening divisions on the U.N. Security Council, the administration in recent months has tried to reduce conflicts over the inspectors' intrusive forays into suspected Iraqi weapons sites.

The latest dispute with Iraq appeared Thursday to be escalating anew into confrontation, even as officials here and in Washington continued to be cautious and low-key in their attempts to get Baghdad to resume cooperating with weapons inspectors. Iraq on Thursday issued bellicose attacks on reports by U.N.

On the eighth anniversary of its invasion of Kuwait, Iraq appears determined this week to provoke yet another confrontation with the West over U.N. efforts to rid Baghdad of its deadliest weapons. Clinton administration officials have long predicted a new showdown as part of President Saddam Hussein's long-running effort to erode the international consensus backing tough economic sanctions against his regime. But the U.S.

In his soiled kaffiyeh, making food deliveries in a battered pickup to earn $3 a day, Abdel Karim Goma has not had the golden retirement due a former Health Ministry director-general. Still, despite his suffering in Iraq's sanctions-choked economy, Goma was all smiles Monday on learning that his government had struck a deal with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that seems to avert the possibility of this nation being engulfed by renewed military conflict.

After weeks of increasingly bellicose rhetoric, the maneuvering of hundreds of attack planes and dozens of warships, and diplomatic shuttling across tens of thousands of air miles, it may have come down to two leaders in a room accompanied only by an interpreter. One was Kofi Annan, the trim, dapper career bureaucrat who administers the United Nations and rarely raises his voice above a whisper.

The peaceful end to the latest standoff with Iraq might actually lead to greater reduction of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological arsenal while also avoiding major political costs for the United States, analysts agreed Monday. United Nations inspectors, provided they are granted the access Hussein has now promised, have a far better chance of eliminating weapons of mass destruction than would be likely through a campaign of airstrikes, the analysts believe.