By John M. Goshko
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 18, 1998; Page A56

UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 17 – Ambassadors from the 15 Security Council countries went through the motions today of discussing how to regain control over efforts to eliminate Iraq's prohibited weapons, but there was no sign of a narrowing of the differences that caused the United States and Britain to launch airstrikes without consulting the council.

In their consultations today, the ambassadors did little more than hear reports from U.N. officials about the damage in Iraq and what humanitarian workers there might be able to do to alleviate civilian suffering. They also talked inconclusively, as one diplomat said, "about how the United Nations might get back into the game."

But given the rift dividing the council's five permanent, veto-wielding members, many diplomats said glumly that the council's campaign to disarm Iraq during the eight years since the Persian Gulf War may have failed and that some new approach to the problem might have to be found, even if it lies outside the United Nations.

Washington and London, the most implacable foes of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, maintained that existing resolutions – coupled with their warning to Iraq last November that further defiance of U.N. weapons inspectors would bring attack with no warning – gave them the authority to act. But both also were aware that if they had paused to ask for council support, permission for airstrikes would likely have been vetoed by Russia and China.

In a formal council debate Wednesday night after the bombs had started to fall, most members, while saying that Iraq had brought the attacks on itself through its defiant attitude, chided the United States and Britain for acting unilaterally. And Russia and China savaged the U.S. and British actions with the kind of angry language that is almost never heard in council debates.

The attacks and resulting acrimony were a setback for the Security Council. At the outset of the 1990s, with the divisions of the Cold War fading, there was a sense here that the council could become what had been envisioned at the 1945 founding of the United Nations – the world's most important multilateral instrument for dealing with threats to international peace and security.

The idea was that the five permanent members – the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China – would work in concert to make decisions, push them through the council and then use the weight of U.N. authority to ensure their observance. In addition to the permanent five, the 10 other council seats are rotated among other U.N. members who vote on actions but have no veto.

Nowhere did this approach work more effectively than when the council authorized the United States to put together the military coalition that in 1991 ended Iraq's aggression against neighboring Kuwait. With consensus among the five that Iraq had to be stripped of its weapons of mass destruction, the council created the inspection commission to oversee the process and inform it when Iraq had met conditions for the lifting of crippling economic sanctions.

But differing national interests and perceptions – particularly concerning Iraq – have eroded that consensus as the decade has progressed. Many countries – particularly in the Third World – have grown uneasy at what they perceive as hardships imposed by the sanctions on the Iraqi populace. A clear majority of U.N. members also has come to regard parts of the U.S. position as unreasonable – including increasingly less subtle calls for Saddam Hussein's ouster and refusal to consider lifting sanctions in response to partial Iraqi compliance with disarmament requirements.

But the biggest differences have been between the hard-line U.S. and British attitudes and those of Russia, China and, to a considerable extent, France. Russia and France would like to re-establish and expand long-standing economic and political ties with Baghdad. China fears that the pressures on Iraq could become a precedent for interfering in its internal affairs.

In recent years, Iraq has worked energetically to exploit those differences in an effort to obtain an easing of sanctions. Repeatedly, Baghdad has challenged U.N. inspections as more intrusive than the council has mandated in hopes of driving further wedges between what it sees as its friends and its enemies.

U.S. threats to respond to Iraqi provocations with military force have been repeatedly stayed by last-minute Iraqi promises to comply. After the most recent aborted showdown, in November, there had been an unspoken sense within the United Nations that the next time the United States would carry out its threats, and for a month the world body drifted toward the collision that came on Wednesday.