Iraq Diplomatic Offensive Seeks End to Isolation : Policy: But a meeting with Japan’s Kaifu yields little. A top Soviet aide carries a Gorbachev message to Baghdad.

Iraq launched a diplomatic offensive Thursday in an effort to punch its way out of international isolation, sending a senior official to Jordan to confer with Japanese Prime Minister Toshiki Kaifu and announcing plans for similar meetings with European officials.

Taha Yassin Ramadan, Iraqi first deputy prime minister, conceded after meeting with Kaifu that their talks had done little to bring Iraq closer to Japan, which has pledged contributions of $4 billion to the multinational effort to dislodge Iraq from Kuwait and to ease the economic hardships brought down on some Middle East nations by the crisis. Japan has also sent medical teams to the Persian Gulf.

Elsewhere on the diplomatic front, Yevgeny Primakov, a senior aide to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, arrived in Baghdad with a message from his chief. Its contents were not made public, but Primakov was quoted by the Soviet news agency Tass as saying that the crisis must be resolved diplomatically in order to “avoid a military explosion.”

Primakov went to Baghdad from Amman, where he began his Middle East mission Wednesday by meeting with Jordanian officials and Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The United States, meanwhile, pulled the aircraft carrier Independence out of the Persian Gulf, where it had arrived two days earlier. A Navy spokesman in Washington said the Independence had completed its mission.

The Pentagon reported that the U.S. Navy boarded and diverted a Sudanese freighter Thursday in the Red Sea after discovering that its cargo manifest did not match its load of unspecified “industrial equipment.”

The Sudanese ship, a 400-foot cargo carrier called the Blue Nile, was headed toward the Jordanian port of Aqaba when it was stopped and boarded by a team from the American guided-missile frigate Samuel B. Roberts.

An inspection of the ship’s cargo revealed the discrepancy between the goods and the documentation, and the ship was ordered to change course.

The Blue Nile was the seventh ship diverted by U.S. warships since the naval embargo of Iraq began in mid-August. A total of 170 ships have been boarded and inspected by officers from allied navies in the Persian Gulf region, 139 of them by U.S. personnel.

Baghdad’s Ramadan, who is believed to rank second only to President Saddam Hussein in the Iraqi leadership, insisted at a news conference here that the fact that the Kaifu meeting had taken place proves that Iraq is committed to finding a peaceful solution to the crisis it created by invading Kuwait on Aug. 2.

It was a rare public appearance for Ramadan, who was accompanied by two dozen security men in business suits. He used the news conference to make one of the clearest statements yet on Iraq’s position in the crisis.

He linked Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait directly with Israel’s occupation of the territories it seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Also, he said Iraq will withdraw the 430,000 troops it has in Kuwait if Israel agrees to withdraw from its occupied territories, including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Iraq, he emphasized, will not withdraw unilaterally from Kuwait.

Echoing what Hussein said in a speech Sunday, Ramadan rejected the idea of an “Arab solution” to the crisis, as proposed by Jordan’s King Hussein, among others. He said that anything short of an agreement that also resolves the Palestinian question would be “an aid to American terrorism.”

Ramadan reiterated the argument that Iraq holds thousands of foreigners against their will, some of them some aged and infirm, only as a deterrent to war.

“This situation has occurred to give peace a chance,” he said.

Speaking in soft tones and puffing on a thin cigar, Ramadan reverted to familiar Iraqi rhetoric when he spoke of the United States. He said Iraq will retaliate swiftly against Israel if the United States strikes first.

“We’ll make this entire region a cemetery for all aggressors,” he said. “We have decided not to fire the first bullet--but if America starts it, they will not be able to determine the end of the battle, the size of the battlefield, or even where the battle will take place . . . including Israel. The age of American terrorism, in which they had time to rule over Arab leaders and rob their resources, is over.”

Clearly, though, Ramadan intended to convey a message of peace, to present the Hussein regime as reasonable and committed to resolving the situation without resorting to force.

He also made it clear that Hussein intends to use diplomacy and the rhetoric of peace as tools to probe for soft spots in the embargo that has closed Iraq’s ports. He assailed what he called the brutality of the embargo.

“The coming period,” he said, “will witness more active (diplomatic) attempts . . . in order to enlarge the dialogue between us and the European community. We are confident that, just to ease the American domination, the will for a peaceful solution exists in many Western countries, for a solution through the path of war has no gain for anyone. The only beneficiaries from war will be the Americans.”

Earlier in the day, Ramadan gave King Hussein a letter from Saddam Hussein, and some analysts said it may have contained an attempt to explain what the Iraqi leader meant when he said in the speech Sunday that moderate Arab leaders were “firmly in the ranks of the enemy.”

Ramadan had words of praise for the king, who, he said, will play “a very active role in opening the door to dialogue.”

Also Thursday, the State Department said the United States has chartered another flight for refugees from Kuwait and Iraq next week. A department official said that about 100 people, not all of them Americans, are expected to be on the flight. He said the Americans are primarily children with non-American parents and siblings.

Last month, the State Department said it had completed the refugee airlift because it had already evacuated all Americans who had permission to leave and wanted to go. At the time, the department said that additional flights would be arranged if there was a need for them.

The official said Thursday that Iraq has not relaxed its exit procedures but that a number of people who have been free to leave all along have now decided to do so.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State James A. Baker III reiterated his assessment that while all nations prefer a diplomatic solution, a growing number of U.S. allies are willing to explore the possibility of military action.

Times staff writers John M. Broder and James Gerstenzang, in Washington, contributed to this story.