Michael Ledeen is reporting this morning that there is a possibility of a failed attempt on the life of Iranian President Ahmadinejad:

I’ve just received a call from a usually reliable person saying that there was an assassination attempt in Iran against President Ahmadi Nezhad, who was in a car. His driver and guards were killed, and he is in the hospital, apparently likely to survive. I couldn’t get any details about the intensity of the blue energy waves flowing from his cranium…but if this story is true it suggests that there are powerful folks in Iran who have decided the president is more trouble than he’s worth…and they’d rather go back to the old deception of having someone who can lull the West into a false sense of security.

Ledeen notes “powerful folks” are upset with the President. Actually, there is really only one rival power center in Iran - the Rafsanjani-Khatami axis that has been increasingly strident in their criticism of Ahmadinejad in recent weeks:

Rafsanjani, who has already attacked the new government for a worsening of international tensions over Iran’s disputed nuclear program, also said he worried that national unity had been badly damaged during Iran’s dramatic shift to the right.

“Such attitudes will allow the enemies to reach their objectives,” the official news agency IRNA quoted Rafsanjani as telling a gathering of Muslim prayer leaders.

The term “enemies” is generally used to refer to the United States and Israel.

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is a former President (as well as a former Supreme Leader, the position now held by Ayatollah Khamenei) and leader of the Expediency Council, a body that is supposed to iron out differences between the various branches of the Iranian government. Apparently, Rafsanjani has carved out a separate sphere of influence within the Iranian government and is challenging Ahmadinejad’s reckless and warlike moves - not on the basis that they are wrong but , as Mr. Ledeen points out, because the wild rhetoric puts the US and Israel on guard.

Rafsanjani is playing an extraordinarily dangerous game if he is in any way connected with an assassination attempt. As rich and as powerful as he is, the fact is that Ahmadinejad is Khamenei’s fair-haired boy and as such, the Supreme Leader will brook no attempt to overturn this radical shift to the right that the Iranian President has undertaken. As I’ve speculated in the past, the mullahs may in fact be forcing a confrontation with Israel and the west at this juncture because the correlation of forces - military and especially political - are so much in their favor. Israel has never been so isolated and for the foreseeable future, the bulk of America’s armed forces will be tied up in Iraq. If Rafsanjani thinks that his opposition to the recasting of the Iranian government into a hardline mirror image of its President is going down well with Supreme Leader Khamenei, he is sadly mistaken.

So, does Rafsanjani (who has apparently cast his lot with the reformers) believe he can overturn the whole applecart? Does he think he can tear down the Supreme Leader as well as kill the President?

He has been making a strong case recently that what Ahmadinejad has been doing is terribly damaging to Iran’s standing in the world. His opposition in no way lessens his own hatred for Israel and the US. And it is doubtful that even a President acceptable to Rafsanjani would slow down much less halt the Iranian drive to acquire nuclear weapons (Rafsanjani began the program when he was Supreme Leader back in the 1980’s).

Even if Rafsanjani had nothing to do with an attempted assassination, don’t put it past Ahmadinejad to seize the opportunity to arrest him anyway. It would make sense in light of the Iranian President’s drive to expel all moderate influences from the Islamic Republic and turn the once prosperous, modern country of Iran into a nuclear armed 15th century theocracy.

UPDATE

Via Ace, possible confirmation of the assassination attempt:

One of the bodyguards of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was killed and another wounded when an attempt to ambush the presidential motorcade was thwarted in the southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan, according to a semi-official newspaper and local residents.
“At 6:50 pm on Thursday, the lead car in the presidential motorcade confronted armed bandits and trouble-makers on the Zabol-Saravan highway”, the semi-official Jomhouri Islami reported on Saturday.

“In the ensuing armed clash, the driver of the vehicle, who was an indigenous member of the security services, and one of the president’s bodyguards died, while another bodyguard was wounded”, the newspaper, which was founded by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wrote.

I doubt very much whether an ethnic conflict is at the bottom of this. But it sure sounds better to the masses than saying “My main rival for power is trying to whack me.”