“This is like deja vu all over again,” Yogi Berra supposedly said.

Those words sum up my feelings as I read the news and blogger speculation about purported U.S. plans to bomb Iran.

Perhaps it’s psychological warfare, aimed at getting Tehran to curb its nuclear research program. When Vice President Cheney says Iran will face “meaningful consequences” if it fails to halt that nuclear research, and that the United States is “keeping all options on the table,” he might just be playing hardball to get Iran to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors. But the news on Iran has an ominously familiar ring.

Late last month, the U.N. Security Council asked the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, to report within 30 days on whether Iran has restored a freeze on its uranium enrichment program. Even as the diplomacy continues, unnamed administration officials speculate to the media that the Bush administration is really fixated on Iran regime change. There’s lots of chatter about bomb strikes on Iranian nuclear targets.

Given that the administration admits only to having made “tactical” mistakes in Iraq (and Donald Rumsfeld rejects even such timid self-criticism), one wonders what the Bush team has learned from its Iraq errors. Is anyone applying those lessons to future scenarios for Iran?

Has the White House studied the Bush team’s 2002 delusions that the aftermath of an Iraq invasion would be a snap – and democracy flourish? One hears dangerously similar predictions from neoconservative pundits who believe that U.S. bomb strikes would halt Iran’s nuclear program and precipitate a democratic revolution in Iran.

A much more sober assessment was put forth last week at a conference on Iran at the N.Y.-based Council on Foreign Relations. Both proponents and opponents of bomb strikes agreed, in the words of Iran expert Kenneth M. Pollack, that if the United States bombed Iranian targets, “we would be going to war.”

An effort to bomb Iranian nuclear sites would bear no resemblance to Israel’s 1981 strike at Iraq’s Osirak plutonium reactor. Iran’s uranium enrichment program is spread out; it is believed some facilities are underground at unknown locations. There would be no guarantee of ending the program. And Iranians, who are strongly nationalistic, would most likely rally round their government after such an attack.

“Iran would retaliate,” said the American Enterprise Institute’s Iran expert and former CIA operative Reuel Marc Gerecht, who favors air strikes. He predicted that Iran would encourage terrorist attacks against U.S. interests. “The United States might have to respond with great force,” he went on, “and contemplate an invasion.” In other words, U.S. air strikes on Iran would have momentous consequences, in the Middle East and beyond.

Perhaps the talk about U.S. bomb strikes is aimed at backing up the diplomatic track. But diplomacy has a chance only if pursued intensely. If the White House has already decided it can’t deal with the regime in Tehran, the diplomatic track is doomed. Deja vu all over again.

No one claims that the diplomatic track will be easy. Iran insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes only and points out that its research is permitted under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But Iranian behavior makes its claims hard to believe. It concealed its uranium enrichment program for nearly two decades, and still hasn’t responded fully to the suspicions of U.N. inspectors. The debate is inflamed by the call of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for Israel to be wiped off the map, and by Iranian support for Hezbollah and Hamas. Yet the prospects for diplomacy, backed by the possibility of U.N. sanctions, remain alive, if the White House focuses its efforts.

Indeed, direct talks will begin soon between the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and an Iranian team. These talks had been delayed, but I was told last Wednesday by Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Javad Zarif, that they are “definitely scheduled in around a week.

“The two sides have agreed at the highest levels that the talks should be limited to Iraq,” Zarif said. U.S. officials say they want to convey to Tehran that it must not meddle in Iraqi affairs.

But direct talks between Tehran and Washington, depending on the outcome, could ultimately expand. Even while calling the Kremlin “the evil empire,” President Reagan talked to Soviet leaders about nuclear matters. Now Iran’s leading cleric, Ayatollah Khamenei, has for the first time endorsed talks with the Great Satan.

Another war in the Middle East would be madness – unless we want deja vu all over again.

– Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.