Bush, who emphasized that "each case is different," told a questioner at an overwhelmingly friendly town hall-style gathering here that the White House would also have to be sure that such dialogue would pay off.

"If your question is 'will you ever sit down with them,' we've proven we would with North Korea, and the answer is 'yeah, just so long as we can achieve something, so long as we are able to get our objective,'" he said.

"And I guess what I'm telling you is it takes time to get things in place so that there will be results," said Bush, who took aim at his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"We're dealing with a country where the leader has said that he wants to destroy Israel. My belief is that the United States will defend our ally Israel. This is a leader who has made very provocative statements," he said.

"And we have made it clear, however, in spite of that, that we are willing to sit down with him so long as he suspends his program, his nuclear weapons program. In other words, it's his choice, not mine anymore," said Bush.

"I believe that's the best way to achieve an objective without undermining our credibility, without sending the wrong signal to people," said the US president.

Iran denies Western charges that it seeks nuclear weapons under cover of a civilian atomic energy program, and has drawn UN sanctions for refusing to freeze its uranium enrichment, which can yield materials for a nuclear bomb.

Over the past few months, Bush has sharply ramped up his rhetoric against the Islamic republic -- at one point wrongly saying that Tehran had openly claimed it sought nuclear weapons -- and blaming it for attacks on US soldiers in Iraq.

"The truth of the matter is, Iran is using Hezbollah in Lebanon and, you know, is worried about democracy in the Middle East, can't stand the thought of a democratic government on their border, is creating issues of peace," he said.

"There'd be nothing worse for world peace (than) if the Iranians believe that the United States didn't have the will and commitment to help young democracies survive" in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran's neighbors, said Bush.

"If we left before the job was done, there'd be chaos. Chaos would embolden not only the extremists and radicals who would like to do us harm, but it'd also embolden Iran," he said.

"What you don't want is to have a nuclear arms race taking place in the Middle East. And so, our objective with Iran is to peacefully deal with the issue and convince the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons ambitions for the sake of peace," he said.

"And that requires more than one voice speaking to them. It requires the international community understanding the stakes of what a nuclear-armed Iran could mean," he said, linking international pressure on Tehran to the six-country talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons programs.

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