Baghdad, Iraq ? Arms inspectors exaggerated problems over progress in their pivotal reports to the U.N. Security Council, a senior Iraqi complained Tuesday. He said Baghdad would work on the problems, including scientists’ rejection of private U.N. interviews.

On another issue — U.N. reconnaissance overflights — Lt. Gen. Amir Rashid said Iraq would allow them if the Security Council told Washington to ground its attack planes during such missions.

Diplomats said this was not a serious concession. With the United States and Britain, who are conducting the flights, both having veto power in the council, approval was highly unlikely.

In Iraq’s first detailed response to Monday’s reports by chief inspectors Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, Rashid, a presidential adviser, said his government was cooperating with inspectors “with all our capacity” to show that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction. He said it would do more as required.

The Blix-ElBaradei assessment set the stage for renewed debate among world governments about what to do in Iraq — allow U.N. inspections to go on, or short-circuit what Blix calls “the peaceful route” and opt for war against Iraq, as threatened by Washington and London.

Today, the Security Council meets in New York with Blix and ElBaradei to discuss questions raised by council members about their reports. Secretary of State Colin Powell will go to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 to present the U.S. case.

In his report Monday, Blix said the Iraqis were cooperating by granting full access for inspectors, but said they’d failed to offer evidence to allay suspicions they retain chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs. They seem not to have come to “genuine acceptance” of U.N. disarmament demands, he said.

In his meeting with reporters late Tuesday, Rashid objected to such judgments.

“We are cooperating with all our capacity, and if there is a demand for additional cooperation on some issue, here or there, we will do it,” he said.

The general, a former military-industrial chief, complained that in the Blix-ElBaradei reports “there was no proportionate presentation of the facts. We see, for example, some facts amplified and magnified, on what are called problems … while important points have been abbreviated.”

One point that should have been stressed, he said, was that U.N. inspections, renewed two months ago after a four-year gap, have shown that allegations contained in U.S.-British intelligence reports late last year were “totally false.”

Those reports suggested that U.N.-prohibited weapons activity may have been resumed at a dozen Iraqi “sites of concern.” Inspections over the past two months have repeatedly covered these installations and no major violations of U.N. edicts have been reported.