European Nations Make Own Bid to Solve Crisis : Diplomacy: EC members invite Iraq to a meeting. They promise efforts to settle the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Twelve European nations Friday invited Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz to their own meeting and dangled the prospect of an eventual effort to address the longstanding and intractable Arab-Israeli conflict.

The foreign ministers of the 12 European Community nations insisted that their sole purpose in asking Aziz to Luxembourg next Thursday, a day after he is to meet with Secretary of State James A. Baker III in Geneva, is to resolve the Persian Gulf crisis peacefully.

“We must exhaust all possibilities that might lead to a peaceful solution,” said German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher.

But the brief communique issued by the foreign ministers went on to say that after any peaceful settlement has been reached, “the (European) Community and its member states reaffirm their commitment to contribute actively to a settlement of the other problems of the region and establish a situation of security, stability and development there.”

French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, asked if this language links Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait to the Arab-Israeli issue, said, “It is a question of logic and coherence, not a link.”

In Washington, a State Department official said the United States has no objection to the EC position because it does not directly link Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

“There isn’t any real problem with that,” the official said of the EC communique. “President (Bush) said something similar to that at the United Nations--once the gulf crisis is over, the world should address other Middle East disputes.

“We reject any linkage, but this isn’t linkage,” he added.

Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jacques Poos, declared that “there is nothing in the European declaration, not one single sentence, that could ruffle American sensitivities.”

Poos, whose tiny nation holds the EC presidency for the first six months of this year, is one of three foreign ministers who are proposing to meet with Aziz next Thursday. The other two are Gianni De Michelis of Italy, which held the presidency for the second half of 1990, and Hans Van den Broek of the Netherlands, which will assume the presidency on July 1.

The communique adopted by the foreign ministers said the Europeans will continue to consult closely with the United States to ensure that Iraq receives identical messages from both sides of the Atlantic.

The communique unmistakably demanded Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait by Jan. 15. The U.N. Security Council has authorized the U.S.-led multinational force assembled in the Persian Gulf area to evict Iraq by force after that deadline. The foreign ministers acknowledged that it might already be too late for the Iraqis to complete a withdrawal by then.

British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd called for “an element of practical common sense.” The multinational force poised in the Persian Gulf region to attack Iraq would wait, he said, if Iraq’s withdrawal were under way.

It was only during the middle of their four-hour meeting that the European foreign ministers learned that Aziz had agreed to meet with Baker next week. Until then, according to Hurd, debate centered on whether the Europeans should act before Iraq responded to President Bush’s proposal Thursday for a Baker-Aziz meeting.

Some nations--sources said they included France--urged going ahead regardless. The Dutch and British, Hurd said, wanted to wait for a response to the U.S. proposal.

“We should not give the Iraqis the impression that they had a choice” between negotiating with the United States and talking to Europeans, Hurd said.

Hurd said the foreign ministers spent little time discussing how to address the Arab-Israeli conflict after the Persian Gulf crisis is settled. “We will need to go back into that matter with some vigor after the crisis is resolved,” he said.

But Poos listed the eventual solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict alongside Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait as one of the two main ideas discussed by the foreign ministers.

“We have committed ourselves to address the other problems of the Middle East” after the gulf crisis is resolved, he stressed.

Dumas added that the other problems of the Middle East include not only the Arab-Israeli conflict but also the long and devastating civil war in Lebanon.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster, in Washington, and researcher Isabelle Maelcamp, in Luxembourg, contributed to this story.