Yes, I was once an active member of the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and John McCain. Yes, I worked to elect Republican candidates. Yes, I am cool with you knowing that.

My first gig was for Richard Green Lugar, US Senator for the great State of Indiana, Republican and the last Boy Scout in American public life. Nicknamed 'the wise man' in a recent issue of Timemagazine. Tragically ignored in 2004 (by myself included) when he called for a radical strategy change in Iraq. So popular that the Democrats aren't fielding a candidate against him this autumn.

In his spare time, when not managing his family's corn and soybean farm, he decommissions former Soviet nuclear sites and lobbies for money to get former Soviet nuclear scientists back on the payroll so they don't need to look for work, say, building centrifuges at Natanz in Iran.

Last Sunday he broke with the Bush Administration and called for direct talks between the United States and Iran over Tehran's nuclear programme. This is a much bigger deal than you might think.

The US and Iran haven't been on speaking terms for 25 years. On 4 November 1979, Iranian students acting at the urging of Ayatollah Khomeini stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage, effectively ending the presidency of Jimmy Carter . . . holding them until just after Ronald Reagan was sworn into office in January 1981.

One of the people who helped orchestrate the hostage-taking event was a civil engineering undergrad called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When he was elected president of Iran last June, some former hostages claimed he was one of their actual captors. Plans to sue him were briefly mooted, which seem kind of quaint now.

So to propose sitting down with this chap about anything is not just to grasp a nettle but to do so on an old wound. The history the US has with Ahmadinejad and his mates is dark and serious stuff.

In the last few weeks there's been a wave of war fever in the global media . . . where us neocon conspirators can now get Google News to deliver us the unexpurgated comments of Ahmadinejad to his own state media. Fox News's Bill O'Reilly has taken to calling the Iranian mullahs Nazis. European commentators are halfrepulsed and half-salivating at the prospect of a US or Israeli strike. Timothy Garton Ash had a particularly nightmarish piece in the Guardian this week set in 2009 after the Hillary Clinton administration bombed Iranian nuclear sites and 10,000 people in London, New York and Tel Aviv died in retaliatory suicide bombings. Clock ticking. Deadline this Friday.

Amid all the stepped-up rhetoric and doomsday scenarios there have been a few nods to reality.

In the current issue of Commentary magazine, historian and strategist Edward Luttwak (a sixth-order knight of the neocon conspiracy, if my secret decoder ring is working properly) writes a superb 6,000-word piece offering 'Three Reasons Not to Bomb Iran . . . Yet', arguing that the natural geopolitics of Iran give it common interests with the US that will one day draw them together again. Moreover, he adds, the Iranian theocracy has been waning. Outside of India, Iran had until recently the most pro-American public opinion in Asia.

Ahmadinejad wants . . . desperately . . . for the US to attack.

It would not only likely fail to halt the nuclear programme, it would get the regime off life support and into political health. And Ahmadinejad thinks it will hasten the return of 10th-century imam AbulQassem Muhammad as the mahdi, or Shi'ite messiah, for the Apocalypse.

The worst thing that could happen for Ahmadinejad, tactically, would be for the Bush Administration to confound expectations and accept Dick Lugar's advice to do the sitdown, about not just Iran's nuclear programme but the whole region and about the nature of the Tehran regime.

Having exhausted every other practical option on the region (the US Army's phone is going straight to voicemail this year), listening to loyal but sane Republican Lugar may prove appealing in the White House this week.