In late spring 2006, Condi finally got her way.

For nearly three decades, sensible American policy had dictated resisting official meetings with and overt legitimization of Iran’s murderous jihadist regime. But in May 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice persuaded President Bush that direct negotiations were the way to go.

Let’s ignore that back-channel talks had been ongoing since the Khomeini era . . . leading to such debacles as the Iran-Contra scandal.

Leave aside, too, that the Bush-negotiation initiative, far from a position of strength, was launched out of weakness: The mullahs were actively orchestrating the murder of American troops in Iraq, all the while defying pusillanimous efforts by the U.S. and weak-kneed Europeans to forestall Iran’s development of nuclear weapons.

In fact, let’s even ignore Khobar Towers. In 1996, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps had coordinated a bombing in Saudi Arabia, an act of war that killed 19 members of the United States Air Force. It is not enough to say the Clinton administration did nothing; it actually obstructed the investigation that would have brought Iran’s attack on the United States to light.

The Bush administration, similarly, did nothing — even as Iran stepped up its anti-American aggression, harbored al-Qaeda fighters, and (as even the 9/11 Commission grudgingly conceded) very likely facilitated the travel of the suicide hijackers who killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.

No, let’s forget all those things ever happened. Let’s just stick to Spring 2006.

To recount: We were dealing with an apocalyptic regime certain that radical Islam’s global triumph was as imminent as the long lost Mahdi’s arrival any day now. President Bush had said time and again that it was pointless to negotiate with terrorists because they are — surprise! — incorrigible. Yet, Secretary Rice convinced the president that the ball would really be advanced by [drum-roll] . . . direct U.S. negotiations with Iran.

Flash forward to 2008. The Democrats’ presumptive (and increasingly less-compelling) nominee, Sen. Barack Obama, has rightly been ridiculed for his offer to meet, without preconditions, with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His stated policy is so patently idiotic that Obama, on the cusp of the brass ring, has been reduced to lying about whether he actually stated it (he did, repeatedly), and to dissembling about whether preconditions are the same thing as preparations he now purports to have envisioned all along.

My question is: Why?

Why does Obama feel the need to lie about a suggestion that, at best, is only marginally more vapid than what has passed for the Bush Iran policy?

Back to spring 2006. Iran was being particularly obstreperous about its nuclear-technology development. The State Department proposed direct negotiations — i.e., face-to-face meetings between the president’s emissaries and Ahmadinejad’s subordinates.

What was the price? What stringent preconditions did Condi Rice persuade the president that we should demand?

A commitment to foreswear, or at least suspend, the development of nuclear weapons?