Foreign leaders make a fuss. The president makes a face. The secretary of state makes a complicated color-coded calendar. A new policy is born. If White House aides speaking anonymously to the New York Times are to be believed, that’s how the US came to decide talks with Iran, or at least the potential for talks with Iran, might not be such a bad idea.

The genesis of Bush’s decision to conditionally offer Iran the opportunity for direct talks with the US on Iran’s nuclear power program is a bit more complicated than that, but not much: A meeting [Rice] had attended in Berlin days earlier with European foreign ministers had been a disaster, she reported, according to participants in the discussion. Iran was neatly exploiting divisions among the Europeans and Russia, and speeding ahead with its enrichment of uranium. The president grimaced, one aide recalled, interpreting the look as one of exasperation “that said, ‘O.K., team, what’s the answer?’ “

And thus was diplomacy added to the Bush administration’s diplomatic arsenal. It’s government by pantomime. Apparently the cabinet got this one right; the possibility remains open that the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program arose from an ill-timed scratch of the presidential ear that said “my ear itches” but was interpreted as “let’s start eavesdropping on everybody.” Lord knows interpretations can be problematic even when everyone involved is using actual words.

Recounting the decision-making process, anonymous White House officials offered a number of details, including that Rice had cooked up a color-coded calendar deemed by her former National Security Council deputy, Stephen Hadley, to be “brilliant, colorful, and completely impenetrable.”

At a private dinner on March 6 at the Watergate with Ms. Rice, Mr. Hadley and Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, Mr. Lavrov warned that Iran could do what North Korea did in 2003 — throw out inspectors and abandon the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. That would close the biggest window into Iran’s program, making it hard to assess its bomb capability — the same issue that had led to huge errors in Iraq.

On March 30, Ms. Rice traveled to Berlin for what turned into a fractious meeting with representatives of the other four permanent members of the Security Council and Germany. She questioned what kind of sanctions would be effective. The conversation went nowhere.

That led to Ms. Rice’s warning to Mr. Bush over lunch, on April 4, that the momentum to confront Iran was disintegrating. Mr. Bush, one aide noted, was receiving special intelligence assessments every morning, some on Iran’s intentions, others examining Mr. Ahmadinejad’s personality, still others exploring how long it would take Iran to produce a bomb.

On Easter weekend, Ms. Rice sat in her apartment and drafted a two-page proposal for a new strategy that pursued three tracks: the threat of “coercive measures” through the United Nations, negotiations with Iran that included what Ms. Rice has called “bold” incentives for Iran to give up the production of all nuclear fuel and a separate set of strategies for economic sanctions if the Security Council failed to act.

They were accompanied by a calendar Ms. Rice had marked in three colors tracking the schedule for each of the three tracks, which Mr. Hadley told her was “brilliant, colorful, and completely impenetrable.”

For the first time, her proposal also raised a question the administration had long avoided: Had the time arrived for the United States to play what she and Mr. Bush, both bridge players, called their biggest card — offering to talk with Iran? She shared the proposal with Mr. Hadley, and then raised it with Mr. Bush in private on May 5.

The idea intrigued Mr. Bush, White House officials say, and on May 8, Ms. Rice met with him just hours before flying to New York for a meeting with her European counterparts.

If these White House insiders are to be believed, only a near-complete diplomatic meltdown was enough to bring Rice, in consultation with Hadley, to present, with or without visual aids, the “intriguing” idea of participating in multilateral talks with Iran to the president, and only the punctuation to the meltdown, a thoroughly acrimonious conversation between Rice and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov the evening Rice flew to New York after meeting with Bush, finally convinced her that the administration should adopt some variant of the idea.

Rice apparently had to insist that Bush get personally involved in the affair by calling Valdimir Putin and German chancellor Angela Merkel to persuade them that the US was serious enough about the initiative to warrant their support for it, although the story isn’t clear on this; earlier, his phone calls to the two leaders were described in the context of his requirement for reassurances from them that they wouldn’t hang the US out to dry if the talks were held and didn’t work out.

Presumably the narrative provided by the White House is meant to cast Bush and his associates in the best of lights. The president is portrayed as engaged, generating “a flurry of phone calls to Ms. Rice and to Stephen J. Hadley, his national security adviser, that often began with questions like “What if the Iranians do this,” gaming out loud a number of possible situations.” Rice is credited with brokering a “changed dynamic between the State Department and the White House,” and both Rice and Hadley are implicitly portrayed as having successfully marginalized Dick Cheney and his coterie of bloodthirsty wonks.

All of which may be true to one degree or another, but none of which erases the four years during which the notion of talking to Iran was regarded as opening a dialogue with the devil. That the president of the US, a country which maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, that brought China in from the cold, that even in its current incarnation acceded to participation in multilateral talks with North Korea, could regard the prospect of direct diplomacy with Iran as unusual to the point of intrigue is bizarre. And lest we forget, the Iranian regime snubbed by Bush in the early years of his reign, when he named the country as a charter member of the Axis of Evil, was a considerably more moderate one than holds power now, at least so far as the elected members of it are concerned, and the US policy toward that earlier regime helped usher in the current one.

Whether or not the administration are serious about negotiating with Iran remains unclear. Cheney and his faction appear to regard the offer to negotiate in much the same light as he and other architects of the Iraq war regarded US recourse to the UN, and the subsequent injection of UN inspectors, in 2002: as an inevitably fruitless gesture the failure of which could be used to advance the case for war. But the dynamic between Foggy Bottom and the White House isn’t the only one changed since Powell’s departure, and the US will have considerably more difficulty using negotiations as a stalking horse than they did in 2002.

Iran’s reaction to the conditional offer of negotiations and the package of incentives to which the offer is attached has been, by recent standards, favorable. Since every other head of state involved, with the lone exception of Tony Blair, clearly regards Bush as being on diplomatic probation, it’s likely that a cooperative Iran would find allies in any effort to gain security guarantees from the US. So even if the administration aren’t sincere, they may find themselves inextricably ensnared in a web of diplomacy that would smother any prospect of US military action against Iran.

The Times story says Bush “seems acutely aware that part of his legacy may depend on his ability to prevent Iran from emerging as a nuclear power in the Middle East, without again resorting to military force.” I suspect he views the problem more in terms of bringing the rest of the world around to endorsing an attack on Iran if he feels like authorizing one. If not, and since the one bulletproof way to guarantee an Iranian nuclear weapons program is to attack the country without completely destroying it, his primary challenge is simply keeping a lid on Cheney and the gang. Tough job, and one for which he’s so far shown no aptitude, but it can’t be any tougher than nuancing in public.

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