Iraq, already badly battered by extensive U.N. sanctions, faces the threat next week of further penalties – including a travel ban against its leadership – following the latest standoff with U.N. arms inspectors.

The 15-nation U.N. Security Council is ready to begin discussing Monday the travel ban on Iraqis, with the United States and Britain leading the demand for new punishment for Baghdad. Their outcry follows Iraq’s restrictions on the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) entrusted with verifying the scrapping of its military arsenal.

For years, London and Washington have led the push for tougher sanctions on Iraq, while other governments – including the other three veto-wielding permanent Council members, France, Russia and China – have opposed it. But recent threats by Iraqi officials to stop cooperating with UNSCOM have sung the the momentum toward the pro-sanctions forces for the first time.

The most recent dispute came after Iraq disapproved of the latest UNSCOM report presented this month by its new chief, Australian Ambassador Richard Butler. Butler argued that Iraq’s report last month on the destruction of its arsenal “fails to give a remotely credible account of Iraq’s biological weapons programme.”

The report, and descriptions of Iraqi restrictions on the travel of UNSCOM agents, sparked the latest Council drive for new sanctions against Iraq, which has suffered a near-total embargo on all trade since its short-lived August 1990 invasion of neighbouring Kuwait. (The main exception to the embargo is Baghdad’s allowance to sell one billion dollars of oil to buy humanitarian goods every 90 days, under strict U.N. monitoring.)

On Wednesday, Iraq struck back, when its U.N. ambassador, Nizar Hamdoon, warned Butler that any further sanctions would put an end to its current degree of cooperation with UNSCOM. “I do not…know exactly why he came to tell me these facts, as I have no authority with respect to the formulations of the Council,” Butler said afterward.

In any case, the Iraqi comments brought an immediate backlash in the Council. “In general, if anybody of the United Nations is threatened…(the United Nations) doesn’t react well,” Ambassador Juan Somavia of Chile, the current Council president, said Friday. The Council would not be intimidated by the threats of non- cooperation, he added.

The pro-sanctions forces, therefore, are hopeful that the next few days offer the best chance in a long time to clamp down on Baghdad following what one British official called its “inadmissible and totally counterproductive” remarks.

At the same time, the anti-sanctions bloc also is entrenched in its position, with Russia, France and Egypt leading a contingent of nations who contend that the embargo has already gone on too long and caused too much suffering. French Ambassador Alain Dejammet hinted that Paris would not accept any new penalties and argued that Butler had not asked the Council to adopt any.

Nevertheless, Butler’s presentation Thursday of Iraq’s weapons capabilities shows how hard the road ahead will be for Baghdad. The sanctions cannot end until UNSCOM verifies that all of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction have been scrapped. But although the weapons inspectors have reported progress in constraining Baghdad’s long-range missiles and chemical and nuclear capabilities, the biological weapons picture is murkier.

“Iraq persisted for some four of the past six and a half years with the assertion that it had no such programme,” Butler said. “Iraq has now admitted that this original assertion was false, but, notwithstanding repeated requests by (UNSCOM)…that declaration has never been made in a way that remotely approximates what is known to be the truth of the matter.”

More importantly, Butler said, Iraq has only grudgingly complied with U.N. demands on arms over the past seven years, following a pattern of “statements which are without factual basis, revision of the known chronology of relevant events, and accusations of dishonesty and bad faith on the part of the Commission.” He also took offense at Iraqi allegations that the UNSCOM monitors are biased.

For Iraq, however, the frustration has been that, whether its officials comply with UNSCOM requests or not, the Security Council never gets any closer to lifting part or all of the embargo. Even the limited “oil-for-food” sales have lagged badly at times, with the United States able to block in the Council oil contracts or humanitarian aid purchases which it finds unacceptable.

The attitude by Moscow and Paris has fed Baghdad’s hopes that some easing of its sanctions burden is inevitable. However, almost every time that a majority of Council members leans toward finding ways to lighten its load, Iraq becomes entangled in a new controversy – and faces a toughening, rather than any easing, of the U.N. embargo.