Rafsanjani Offers to Mediate but Sees No Iraqi Flexibility : Iran: U.S. reaction is neutral, but Moscow welcomes the proposal to meet with Saddam Hussein.

President Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran offered Monday to try to mediate an end to the war between Iraq and American-led forces in the Persian Gulf, declaring that he is willing to meet personally with Saddam Hussein.

But the Iranian leader said he had found no Iraqi flexibility during talks he concluded Sunday in Tehran with a special emissary from Baghdad.

“For the sake of the peace and security of the region and its people,” Rafsanjani told a news conference in the Iranian capital, “I am ready to see Saddam,” the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

The Iranian’s initiative drew a neutral response from Washington but was welcomed in Moscow, which announced that Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Belonogov would fly to Tehran today to consult with Iranian officials about the Persian Gulf War.

At the United Nations, Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar said he welcomes any effort by Iran to help find a settlement in the Persian Gulf.

Rafsanjani said that he gave Hussein’s emissary, Deputy Prime Minister Sadoun Hammadi, a letter to Hussein and that the letter contained an “idea” for peace. “If Saddam accepts our idea, we might prepare a plan on that basis,” the Iranian news agency quoted Rafsanjani as saying.

He did not divulge the details of his idea, nor did he say where he might meet Hussein, a proposal that wartime security would make nearly impossible for both leaders.

In Moscow, spokesman Vitaly Churkin of the Foreign Ministry said: “Rafsanjani expressed his readiness to meet Saddam Hussein. We can only welcome that readiness.” He added that “we do not know all the details of (Rafsanjani’s) statement” but indicated that Belonogov, one of the Kremlin’s top Middle East specialists, would follow up on those details in Tehran and possibly act to merge Soviet and Iranian initiatives seeking a political solution to the Gulf conflict.

In Washington, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater showed no evident enthusiasm for Rafsanjani’s move. “(The Iranians) are not directly involved in the conflict, and our interest is getting Iraq out of Kuwait. . . ,” he said. “We’ve gone through 12 U.N. resolutions, and we’re engaged in a military conflict to do that.

“All we’ve seen is press reports (on Rafsanjani’s initiative),” Fitzwater added. “Nobody has said anything to us directly.”

Washington’s relations with Tehran were broken in 1979, when student militants, inspired by the revolution of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seized the American Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans, most of them diplomats, captive for 444 days. American interests are currently handled by the Swiss Embassy in Iran.

Rafsanjani’s offer to try to mediate in the conflict could establish the first direct and official U.S.-Iranian contacts since the formation of the Islamic republic. But the Iranian president pointed out that the Swiss connection exists and said “the same channel can be

used” this time.

Any direct Iranian contact with the Americans, he told the press conference, would have to be approved by the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s spiritual leader.

The United Nations’s frustrated Perez de Cuellar, who sought futilely to find a way out of the conflict before fighting began Jan. 17, said: “I think Iran is in a good position to produce a formula which could put an end to the present situation. . . . I am hopeful and I keep my fingers crossed.”

At the same time, Perez de Cuellar was the target of another personal attack by Iraqi Foreign Minister Tarik Aziz, who for the second time sent him a letter blaming him for allied attacks against Iraq and accusing him of doing nothing to stop “crimes” against that country.

As allied bombing of Iraq and Kuwait continues, a number of outside powers have attempted to revive initiatives to stop the fighting.

The consensus among envoys from Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa is that the Iraqi leader is unlikely to respond until he feels that his military forces have have been exhausted. They expect he will turn to diplomacy at the last moment of the allies’ Operation Desert Storm to avoid having to surrender, in effect, to the United States--the ultimate humiliation.

Third World countries in particular are groping for a formula to have ready in the event Hussein begins looking for something to snatch hold of.

A five-nation North African initiative was launched by Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Tunisia and Mauritania, whose governments formally requested a meeting of the U.N. Security Council to discuss the war. Morocco has 5,000 troops deployed in the Gulf, but King Hassan’s monarchy is feeling the heat of public opposition to the war. The Gulf policies of Algeria and Tunisia are also influenced in part by empathy toward Iraq that exists among their citizens.

In Latin America, 45 political parties, including Mexico’s ruling party, called for a cease-fire and negotiations to end the war and to deal with all the volatile region’s problems. It died on the vine.

The only detailed Iranian proposal so far was one made public last week by Parliament Speaker Mehdi Karrubi, a political opponent of Rafsanjani who was not likely to have been floating a plan for the president.

According to an Iranian news agency report, Karrubi’s unofficial proposal called for an immediate cease-fire followed by simultaneous withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait and Western forces from Saudi Arabia and the smaller Persian Gulf states. They would be replaced by peacekeeping troops from unspecified Islamic countries.

So far, however, Iraq has shown no sign of giving up Kuwait, and Karrubi’s plan is further shackled with conditions the West would find unacceptable tied to any resolution of the Gulf War. These include a halt to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and the formation of an Islamic “committee” to support Palestinian “liberation-seeking struggles” in the occupied territories.

Although they don’t like the terms being bandied around, U.S. officials say they have no opposition to the various diplomatic moves. However, one Administration official warned: “The one danger is that after too many of these, it may appear that everyone outside the coalition supports some form of linkage. That could work against us. And, of course, we will not consider linkage (with the Israeli-Palestinian issue) however it’s packaged.”

Rafsanjani’s government has staunchly resisted any effort or circumstance that might drag it into the war. Yet the nearby fighting and incessant allied air raids on Iraqi provincial territory adjacent to Iran’s southwestern land frontier pose a continuing danger to the policy of neutrality.

At his Tehran press conference Monday, the Iranian leader reaffirmed his policy, saying: “We are not doing anything whatsoever to breach this neutrality.” Officially, Rafsanjani’s government opposes Iraq’s occupation and annexation of Kuwait and the presence of Western forces in the Gulf region.

Since the war began, however, public concern over civilian casualties in Iraq has led Iranian politicians, including the president, to decry the American-led offensive. Last weekend, Tehran announced that it was sending food and medicine to Iraq under supervision of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Islamic solidarity, even with the country that invaded Iran and crippled its economy in a brutal eight-year war in the 1980s, so far runs second to the Iranian government’s determination to keep the fighting away from its borders.

At his press conference, Rafsanjani again said that dispersal of Iraqi airplanes to Iranian bases--whether by order of the Iraqi government or voluntarily by the pilots--was unacceptable.

Times staff writers James Gerstenzang in Washington, John J. Goldman at the United Nations and Kenneth Freed in Cyprus contributed to this story.