United Nations ? Britain and France want to turn the U.N. inspection force that worked in Iraq before the war into a permanent agency authorized to investigate biological weapons and missile programs worldwide, The Associated Press has learned.

The United States opposes the idea, diplomats and U.N. officials said, putting Washington at odds with its wartime ally Britain and in the same camp as Pakistan and Syria — Security Council members whose suspect weapons programs have caused international concern.

For the Bush administration, support for the secret initiative could prove embarrassing after it criticized U.N. inspectors for failing to find the same illicit Iraqi weapons the U.S. search hasn’t come up with yet.

But a formal rejection could also be awkward since the initiative is based on a recognition that one of Washington’s biggest fears — that weapons of mass destruction could get into the wrong hands — is a prime concern for the United Nations as well.

For most of the council and the European Union, saving the agency known as UNMOVIC and returning it to Iraq is an acknowledgment that inspections work.

Britain’s position has always been to get the inspectors back into Iraq. Not so for the United States.

“The coalition has taken on the responsibility for inspections and the search” for weapons in Iraq, U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte has said. Noting that the Security Council is bound by a resolution to discuss UNMOVIC’s future regarding Iraq, Negroponte said this summer: “We haven’t ruled anything in or ruled anything out at this particular time.”

American officials said the United States wouldn’t formally discuss UNMOVIC until after the U.S. weapons search in Iraq was complete. That could leave the U.N. agency in limbo until June, when David Kay, the CIA’s man leading the hunt, is expected to finish his work.

Members of UNMOVIC, the outgrowth of an inspections process created after the 1991 Gulf War, are considered the only weapons experts specifically trained in biological weapons and missile disarmament. They also investigated Iraq’s chemical weapons programs, but international chemical inspections are done by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, based at The Hague, Netherlands.

Britain and France, with help from Russia, Canada and the European Union, are working on a way to turn UNMOVIC into an international inspection team for biological weapons and missiles, diplomats and U.N. officials said on condition of anonymity.

“We think the Iraq experience has helped Americans recognize the potential utility of having someone other than themselves do this kind of work,” one senior Western diplomat said. “The costs are high, the work is hard, and even Congress has said the U.N. inspectors had some better intelligence than the CIA did.”