As the nuclear-sparked crisis in Iran intensifies, some readers worry that I savor military confrontation with Tehran.

Quite the contrary.

I regard military force as truly a last resort. In that spirit, I welcome the latest Bush administration offer of direct talks with Iran, despite Tehran’s initial branding of the proposal as propaganda. It’s worth mentioning that the White House issued a similarly dismissive response to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s surprise letter to President Bush a month ago.

Before readers from the opposite end of the spectrum allow their neck hair to rise, they should consider the appeal of Washington’s new move. I say this with particular reference to the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq, where the United States was too impatient for the international community to complete its investigation of Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction programs – a process that would have taken mere months and provided higher moral authority and perhaps greater global support.

In dealing with Iran, the United States has a larger cheering squad – most important a number of traditional allies – than it had in Iraq, but it could use even firmer ground.

In the nation’s capital recently, I listened to Sanam Vakil of The Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies as she urged a gathering of the National Conference of Editorial Writers to consider a third way in dealing with Tehran.

Nearly three decades of animosity and penalties have not yielded the desired results, Vakil maintained. Rather, that stance has produced an Iran that is overly aggressive and detrimental to U.S. interests. She suggested a serious policy of engagement.

Such thinking goes well beyond Bush’s earlier commitment to pursue diplomacy in Iran, a position that skeptics had hoped was simply lip service. Surely, they argued, Bush knows better than to repeat the mistakes that the United States made in trying to stop North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Actually, at the time that former President Bill Clinton chose to work with Pyongyang, he undertook the most promising strategy to forestall a potential war. Furthermore, North Korea and Iran don’t belong under the same microscope. Iranians have tasted democracy in the recent past, dislike the excesses of their political system and generally desire to improve relations with the West. Transparently feeble diplomacy and hostility by Washington would only push them toward Iran’s crusty clerics.

Let’s remember that the goal here is to sway Iran from its dangerous nuclear research path. Let’s remember that Tehran will not step in that direction without incentives. Let’s remember that a clear condition of U.S. participation in direct talks is that Iran suspend its enrichment and processing activities. And let’s remember that if Iran fails to comply, there properly will be sanctions.

In my view, the efforts by Washington and its partners push the discussion to the next level. They give Iran an extraordinary opportunity to choose whether it will join the mainstream or continue its roguish rampage.