Iranian President Mahmoud Ahamdinejad may be in trouble.

The Associated Press is reporting this morning that the radical firebrand sent a letter to George Bush through the Swiss embassy, the first direct communication between the Iranians and Americans in 27 years:

Iran’s president has written to President Bush proposing ‘’new solutions’’ to their differences, a spokesman in Tehran said Monday.

Government spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham said the letter would be the first in 27 years from an Iranian leader to an American president.

The letter was sent via the Swiss Embassy, which hosts a U.S. interests section in Tehran, Elham told a news conference.

The United States has had no diplomatic relations with Iran since the 1979 storming of the American Embassy in Tehran.

No doubt there will be much more on this today as the story unfolds. But given Ahmadinejad’s recent rhetoric, I hardly think this letter was his idea. Which could mean some of the slightly less radical but still virulently anti-American, anti-West elements in the Iranian government may have temporarily at least, achieved the upper hand and have forced this course of action on the Iranian President.

Could all the war talk in Washington have spooked the mullahs and forced them to rein in their wild-eyed creation? Trying to glean much from a wire service story is an exercise in pure speculation but we can make some intelligent guesses based on what we know has been happening in Iran over the last few months as Ahmadinejad has been at war with a faction led by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjami:

The more pragmatic Iranian leaders, headed by former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, while in principle supporting continuation of the [nuclear] program, believe that Iran must refrain from antagonizing the West, particularly the U.S., over its nuclear activities. They are more inclined to reach a deal worked out by the three leading EU countries, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, rather than relying on Russian and Chinese support at the Security Council. They believe that the extent of trade and economic ties these two countries have with the U.S. and the EU is critical; confronted with serious pressure from the U.S., both Russia and China might withdraw their support for Iran and leave the Islamic regime out in the cold. Meanwhile, Iran has to provide both countries with lucrative deals to compensate for their support.

The deal with the EU may not initially offer Iran a great deal. But in the long run, by convincing the Europeans that Iran is serious in not wishing to develop nuclear weapons, we can benefit a great deal more than by relying on Russia and China. Moreover the EU, particularly the U.K., has far more leverage over Washington than do Russia and China together.

The above was written by Sadegh Zibakalam, a political science professor at Tehran University and a recognized spokesman for the less radical, more internationalist faction in Iran. Appearing as it does in today’s Daily Star, the editorial offers other clues that the Rafsanjani faction, which in many ways represents the Iranian “establishment,” may be in the ascendancy thanks to a combination of US saber rattling and Ahmadinejad’s own miscalculations regarding the radicalization of Iranian society:

In contrast, the hard-liners, headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, advocate a more hawkish approach to the country’s nuclear program. Initially, Ahmadinejad’s disapproval of the way the Iranian team had been negotiating with the Western powers was implicit, but he soon began criticizing the ex-negotiators very openly. Rouhani and his colleagues initially showed constraint and did not respond to Ahmadinejad’s criticisms; eventually however, they lost patience and replied.

They defended their tactics throughout the two years of negotiating with the EU-3, including the two-year voluntary freeze on the country’s enrichment program. The moderates further criticized Ahmadinejad’s comments about Israel and the Holocaust. One reformist newspaper even went so far as to accuse Ahmadinejad of trying deliberately to provoke the U.S. Without naming the president, the newspaper wrote that “it appears that some of our leaders are trying to use the country’s nuclear issue as a tool to score points against the Great Satan. While every effort ought to be undertaken to alleviate U.S. fears about our nuclear program, some of our leaders are in fact behaving in exactly the opposite direction.” Ahmadinejad eventually replaced Rouhani with Ali Larijani.

The future of American-Iranian relations concerning Iran’s nuclear program depends in part on the outcome of the quiet struggle that is unfolding between hard-liners and moderates within the Iranian leadership.

Ahmadinejad’s cleansing of what he sees as “moderate” influences in the foreign service and the ministries did not sit well with the pragmatists who saw their main piplelines that enabled their power (not to mention cutting off their access to ill gotten gains; Rafsanjani is considered the richest man in Iran – not something one achieves on a government salary) closed off to them.

If Ahmadinejad has indeed proposed “new solutions” to deal with the Iranian nuclear program, it had better be more than mere atmospherics. The issues between the US and Iran go far beyond nuclear weapons and having Tehran address their meddling in Iraq, their support for Hizbollah in Lebanon which is a major obstruction to democracy in that country, as well as their support for Hamas would seem to be a prerequisite before any serious rapprochement could happen.

I would hate to see this letter rejected out of hand. But given the Iranian President’s track record, I’m sure Washington will be extremely cautious about responding positively to anything Ahmadinejad has to say.