TEHRAN, Iran -- On the way down from Tehran's main ski hill a few days ago I hitched a ride with two 22-year old university students and asked them whether they were planning to vote in the coming elections. "What elections?" they asked.

Then, after they had phoned a friend to confirm that a nationwide vote is indeed to take place on Dec. 15, they said the same thing I have heard from almost every Iranian I have spoken to over the past month, from millionaires and pop stars to pastoralists and kebab sellers: Of course we won't vote, we're sick of politics.

The turnout later this week will not be strong by Iranian standards, and the body being chosen -- the Assembly of Experts, composed of 86 Shia clerics -- is a typically incestuous component of Iran's "closed loop" constitutional setup. Nonetheless the new assembly will be very meaningful for Iran and the world, for a battle-royal is going on within this country's political elite.

It is not just that the selection of the new body will indicate how successfully Iran's conservatives are stacking the deck. Many Iranians believe that the coming assembly will, some time in its ten-year sitting, be called upon to choose the country's next supreme leader.

Iran adopted its first democratic constitution a hundred years ago this week, and for all the despotism this country has endured since then popular consent still matters greatly in a country where, unlike in the Arab world, political change more often comes from popular pressure than from coups. This tradition of popular politics should be the main element informing the policies of the West as we try to unlock Iran's enormous potential -- driven by its people, who admire the West -- as a friendly player globally.

The lessons of people power in Iran are two: We must increase the isolation and the economic underperformance of the hardliners in this regime; and we must extract the most from the exemplary importance of Iran's neighbor to the west, doing everything necessary to make sure that Iraq's elected government survives and finds its feet. At the heart of every violent struggle in the region, yet full of possibility as a friend to the West, Iran, even more than Iraq itself, is the reason why over the next decade the hopes that the Iraqi people have vested in their constitution and elected government must not be allowed to fail.

This week's election should be focusing our attention on the main question of Iranian politics, which has on the whole been ignored outside Iran: who is going to replace Khameini. The conservatives' champion for supreme leader is Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, Ahmadinejad's ideological mentor. Yazdi, obscure until the rise of his Presidential pupil, is a terrifying prospect, the only member of Iran's high hierarchy who publicly avows suicide bombings and a cessation of contact with the West. Against Yazdi the pragmatists are likely to surprise the world by pushing for Khatami: His huge electoral successes of the past make him a useful safety valve on popular pressures for change, yet he has proven that he does not rock the boat excessively.

Meanwhile Iranians are already looking to the choice that lies ahead for certain. The 2009 presidential elections are shaping up as a referendum on Ahmadinejad personally as well as on the hardline philosophy that he represents. The last time around, in June of 2005, Ahmadinejad, then little known outside of Tehran, beat Rafsanjani -- a widely acknowledged billionaire and Iran's ultimate public fat-cat insider -- on a vague but timely platform of economic change.

Next time around, Ahmadinejad will no longer be the likeable ingénue. Instead he will face the challenge of having presided over four more years of hardship and marginalization. He will be very beatable. (With the candidates on the other side starting to emerge, the dark horse to keep an eye on is Sadegh Kharrazi, Khatami's brilliant and well-connected -- but possibly too independent -- right-hand man.)

Iran's Constitutional structure is a masterpiece of "closed loop" politics, a machine that produces leaders and decisions from intricate webs of blood relationships, marital ties, and old rivalries. Then why does this week's election matter? For all the apathy greeting this particular vote, the intense struggle within Iran's political elite is just as much about managing Iran's "people power" as it is about ideology.

The last time Iranians had the opportunity to choose real change was the last time Khatami ran, in 2001. Even after the inevitable frustrations of his first term, he won 78 percent of the vote on a 65 percent turnout in that election. There are no polls to quote here in Iran, but there can be little doubt that another five years of a desperately demoralizing lack of opportunity and sense of exclusion can have made the regime only more unpopular. In Iran -- which has seen three violent revolutions overthrow three unpopular regimes in the last century -- even more than in most places, an unjust and disliked regime cannot last forever.

Islamic rule is without precedent in 2,500 years of Iranian history. The Islamist tendency accounted for only about half of the revolution against the last Shah, and since then has not become more popular by presiding over 27 years of poverty, intrusiveness, war and isolation. As a system of government, Islam involves far too much pettiness and social control to be viable, especially in a sophisticated place like Iran, which is as much a civilization as a nation state. The system here cannot last, and Iranians have shown -- repeatedly, recently, and in huge numbers -- that they do not want it to.

Should the hardliners stay in control through these next two elections and beyond, the inevitable change here will have to come through yet another revolution: not, with such a fearsome security apparatus, in five years, but in 10 or 15. Should the pragmatists prevail, the change will come more smoothly, more quickly, and from within. The shrewd old players, epitomized by Rafsanjani, will try to give safe vent to the popular volcano on which they perch.

Iran's police state is efficient. The miserable life delivered to the Iranian masses by the Islamic Revolution is leading some of them, although not most, to turn more deeply to Islam. And political apathy is for the moment especially profound among those who would prefer change. But none of this means that there is nothing to be done.

I have been surprised in the months I have spent here to see that exile television programs, some but not all of them funded by Washington, are popular. (The man who runs the corner store down the street from me is quite typical: he keeps believing the L.A.-based talking heads when they say they are shortly to be flying in to the capital's Mehrabad Airport to start the next Revolution.) I have spoken to many businessmen here, people who speak for large chunks of the economy and thus, should their businesses fail, of the public, and who are very afraid of new sanctions. When FIFA, soccer's world governing body, last week expelled Iran for government interference in the national team, ordinary people here took notice. Iranians are blaming their rulers, not far-off Zionists and crusaders, for their fears, hardships, and receding opportunities.

Many -- maybe most, as indicated whenever elections offer an opportunity for genuine change -- ordinary Iranians are fed up with feeling isolated and embarrassed on the global stage. On the streets and in the history books it is clear that most Iranians are not natural outcasts, fanatics and Jew-haters. What the rest of the world can do for this majority of Iranians is to keep the pressure on, to make sure that it is more clear than ever just how badly their government is denying them their potential. This means the visible cold-shoulder, sanctions if necessary, and helping the Iraqis next door provide the powerful example of which their remarkable 2005 constitutional process proved they are capable.

The Baker-Hamilton commission might be right in its eccentric contention that talking pretty with the mullahs will change their behavior in Iraq. But for a document that reaches so far beyond Iraq's borders, it is remarkable that the commission's report ignores the disastrous effect that its recommendations would have on a country that is even more important: Iran itself. Now would be a very dispiriting time indeed to reward Iran's hardliners publicly for denying to Iraqis the freedom and progress that their own people hope for at home.