While most Security Council members want UN inspectors to return to Iraq and finish the job, the Bush administration has made it clear there is no role for them.
Setting up another possible confrontation with the 15-nation council, White House officials have said they wanted to avoid any kind of a deal that would link a lifting of UN sanctions against Iraq to a return of UN arms experts. UN resolutions, however, firmly link the two issues.
"The coalition has taken on responsibility for the dismantling of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, which is part of the international community's shared goal," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. "We are looking forward, not backward."
But Britain, the main US ally, disagrees, its diplomats said, believing that any U.S. findings of banned weapons in Iraq would have more validity if an independent body verified them.
The United States has blamed chief arms inspector Hans Blix for not delivering tougher reports on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, the main reason for the US-led invasion.
But several council members privately said the Bush administration was being vindictive and hoped it would relent after Blix left his post at the end of June. Otherwise, they said there would be serious problems in getting the council to lift rather than suspend the sweeping sanctions.
For his part, Blix said he did not see an "adversarial arrangement" between his inspectors and the US teams. "We're all interested in finding the truth about the situation, whatever it is," he told reporters after a council meeting.
Until now, the US military teams have not found any "smoking guns" either, with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld saying that they expected that scientists and other officials would lead them to hidden sites.
Blix, in an interview with Reuters Television, did not exclude that Iraq still had chemical or biological weapons materials. But he wondered out loud why Gen. Amir al-Saadi, Saddam Hussein's negotiator with the UN inspectors, who surrendered to US military forces a week ago, still insisted Iraq had no banned weapons.
"It is conceivable that the regime was compartmentalised and he did not know what was going on in other areas. But I cannot see that he had any reason to lie. He had no one giving him instructions at this stage," Blix said.
The United States has recruited about a dozen former UN inspectors to verify any weapons or material the military may find. Blix acknowledged were skilled people but lacked the independence of an outside body.
"We may not be the only ones in the world who have credibility, but I do think we have credibility for being objective and independent," Blix told reporters.
"I am also convinced that the world and the Security Council ... would like to have inspections and verification which bear the imprint of an independent institution."
Blix also created a stir by repeating earlier reports he and Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, submitted to the council. Both officials contended that US allegations that Iraq tried to import uranium from Africa were based on falsified documents.
He said it was disturbing that some of the intelligence on which the United States and Britain built a case against Iraq was based on "shaky" documents.