Op-Ed Columnist
Obama, Gospel and Verse

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By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 26, 2007
Sometimes you take a shot.

Yesterday evening I was interviewing Barack Obama and we were talking about effective foreign aid programs in Africa. His voice was measured and fatigued, and he was taking those little pauses candidates take when they’re afraid of saying something that might hurt them later on.

Out of the blue I asked, “Have you ever read Reinhold Niebuhr?”

Obama’s tone changed. “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.”

So I asked, What do you take away from him?

“I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away ... the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”

My first impression was that for a guy who’s spent the last few months fund-raising, and who was walking off the Senate floor as he spoke, that’s a pretty good off-the-cuff summary of Niebuhr’s “The Irony of American History.” My second impression is that his campaign is an attempt to thread the Niebuhrian needle, and it’s really interesting to watch.

On the one hand, Obama hates, as Niebuhr certainly would have, the grand Bushian rhetoric about ridding the world of evil and tyranny and transforming the Middle East. But he also dislikes liberal muddle-headedness on power politics. In “The Audacity of Hope,” he says liberal objectives like withdrawing from Iraq, stopping AIDS and working more closely with our allies may be laudable, “but they hardly constitute a coherent national security policy.”

In Chicago this week, Obama argued against the current tides of Democratic opinion. There’s been a sharp rise in isolationism among Democrats, according to a recent Pew survey, so Obama argued for global engagement. Fewer Democrats believe in peace through military strength, so Obama argued for increasing the size of the military.

In other words, when Obama is confronted by what he sees as arrogant unilateral action, he argues for humility. When he is confronted by what he sees as dovish passivity, he argues for the hardheaded promotion of democracy in the spirit of John F. Kennedy.

The question is, aside from rejecting the extremes, has Obama thought through a practical foreign policy doctrine of his own — a way to apply his Niebuhrian instincts?

That question is hard to answer because he loves to have conversations about conversations. You have to ask him every question twice, the first time to allow him to talk about how he would talk about the subject, and the second time so you can pin him down to the practical issues at hand.

If you ask him about the Middle East peace process, he will wax rhapsodic about the need to get energetically engaged. He’ll talk about the shared interests all have in democracy and prosperity. But then when you ask him concretely if the U.S. should sit down and talk with Hamas, he says no. “There’s no point in sitting down so long as Hamas says Israel doesn’t have the right to exist.”

When you ask about ways to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, he talks grandly about marshaling a global alliance. But when you ask specifically if an Iranian bomb would be deterrable, he’s says yes: “I think Iran is like North Korea. They see nuclear arms in defensive terms, as a way to prevent regime change.”

In other words, he has a tendency to go big and offer himself up as Bromide Obama, filled with grand but usually evasive eloquence about bringing people together and showing respect. Then, in a blink, he can go small and concrete, and sound more like a community organizer than George F. Kennan.

Finally, more than any other major candidate, he has a tendency to see the world in post-national terms. Whereas President Bush sees the war against radical Islam as the organizing conflict of our time, Obama sees radical extremism as one problem on a checklist of many others: global poverty, nuclear proliferation, global warming. When I asked him to articulate the central doctrine of his foreign policy, he said, “The single objective of keeping America safe is best served when people in other nations are secure and feel invested.”

That’s either profound or vacuous, depending on your point of view

Stephen F. DeAngelis
President and CEO, Enterra Solutions, LLC
Visiting Scientist, The Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University


ore than a month after Hurricane
Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast,
anger is still rampant and accusations
continue to fly among federal, state and local
officials, the media, and private citizens.
The experience of Hurricane Rita was less
severe – in part because of the different
nature of the storm, in part because at least
some of the lessons of Katrina were applied
to the planning process.
Planning is really the point. Given the
horrific impact of Katrina, and the obvious
flaws in the immediate response, the state of
rage at individuals and agencies is perfectly
understandable. But it is ultimately not
helpful. True, the performance of many
agencies was sadly lacking. And
the human consequences were
unspeakable. But as we know
from past experiences, such as
the September 11 attacks, the
performance of individuals and
agencies is to a great extent
determined by the performance
of the larger ecosystem – that is,
the complex of interdependent
infrastructure, business,
government, economic and
social systems – within which
they operate.
In the case of Katrina and New
Orleans, the system failed. In
the case of Rita it worked better
– though there were still flaws.
The lesson of both Katrina and
Rita is that it is at the level of the organizing
system that fundamental changes need to
begin. We will focus here largely on Katrina’s
impact on New Orleans, because the scope of
systemic failure helps point the way toward
truly effective systemic change.
What Katrina makes clear is that new
governing principles are needed within and
among state and local agencies. And on a
national level we need a new paradigm to
address new and rapidly changing rules sets
within this fourth wave of globalization.
Katrina’s message is that we have not yet
learned the lessons of September 11 – that in
the most basic terms, the way in which we
respond to major disruptions needs to change.
M
Members of the Oklahoma Army National Guard and agents from the Drug
Enforcement Agency ride in a 5-ton truck performing block-to-block searches in
New Orleans, LA, Sept. 7, 2005. Natural disasters are threat actors, and a resilient
response requires strategic, systemwide planning and coordination. DoD photo.
CITY OF NEW ORLEANS: WHAT HURRICANE KATRINA CAN TEACH US ABOUT RESILIENCE 2
Stephen F. DeAngelis – President and CEO, Enterra Solutions, LLC
This article originally appeared in The Newsletter by Thomas P.M. Barnett, October 10, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Enterra Solutions, LLC. All rights reserved
The response to Katrina illustrates many of
the flaws that are inherent in traditional
systems that have evolved incrementally over
time, and in the bureaucracies that maintain
them. To outside observers, it seemed in the
immediate aftermath of Katrina that
authorities were without a plan.
In fact, the opposite was to a certain extent
true. The agencies responding to Katrina had
many plans – dozens if not hundreds of them.
And most of those plans were thoroughly
worked out. The problem is that they were
tactically focused – designed to protect
individual assets, rather than to protect the
overall ecosystem that is New Orleans and the
Gulf Coast. Agencies did many things – but
most of what they did proved to be
ineffectual because they were not applying
their resources, strategically, to the most
consequential, system-level problems.
Beyond that – the lack of coordination among
plans, and among agencies, led to extreme
confusion and to increasing levels of paralysis.
What was true, dramatically, in New Orleans
is true to a lesser extent in most organizations.
Plans are developed to meet discrete needs –
they are most often siloed. The overall needs
of the organization are seldom addressed.
Resources are duplicated. Costs rise and
inefficiencies multiply. And when a stressor
arrives that impacts the organization as a
whole – such as a natural disaster, or security,
performance or compliance challenges – the
organization’s response is usually found
wanting. Oftentimes the silos fall like
dominoes, in a cascade, as in the case of the
northeast electric power grid’s cascading
power outages and blackout of 2003.
An Organization-Wide Response
o do better, an organization needs to do
more than just improve incrementally – it
needs to fundamentally transform its
approach. And that transformation begins
with asking the right strategic questions. The
approach that my company, Enterra
Solutions, advocates – Enterprise Resilience
ManagementTM – often sounds to first-time
listeners like a technology-centric solution.
And indeed, it has a significant technology
component, focused on the automation of
rules in order to make processes more
adaptive and efficient, and on information
technology architectures that allow critical
business processes to operate across the
organization’s departmental silos, providing
for an organization-wide response.
But before any of that can happen – before
the Enterprise Resilience Management
SolutionTM can be built and deployed – there
needs to be a significant strategic planning
phase. When we begin an engagement, our
first step is to apply our Enterprise Resilience
Management MethodologyTM, which
systematically identifies:
The organization’s critical assets
The business processes that support
those assets
The rules that apply to the processes,
and
The threat actors that have the
potential to disrupt the processes and
put the assets at risk. Threat actors
might be individuals, such as terrorists
– or they might be natural
occurrences, such as a major
hurricane.
The methodology lays the groundwork for an
integrated solution that encompasses people,
process and technology. But at a much more
basic level, it forces the organization to
consider – in a strategic, top-down, systematic
way – what its critical assets are, and how to
go about defending them.
Consider the application of those questions to
the city of New Orleans. Seen at a citywide –
which is to say systemwide – level, it becomes
clear that: T
CITY OF NEW ORLEANS: WHAT HURRICANE KATRINA CAN TEACH US ABOUT RESILIENCE 3
Stephen F. DeAngelis – President and CEO, Enterra Solutions, LLC
This article originally appeared in The Newsletter by Thomas P.M. Barnett, October 10, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Enterra Solutions, LLC. All rights reserved
A critical and most important asset of
the city is its people
Critical processes include everything
necessary to support those people –
businesses that provide revenue and
employment, housing, basic services
such as public safety, healthcare and
sanitation, and basic infrastructure –
such as the maintenance of the levee
system.
The rules define the steps necessary to
defend those basic services and
infrastructure.
The array of threat actors can be, to
some large extent, anticipated.
Terrorists are a known risk in all
major cities; hurricanes are a known
risk for New Orleans in particular,
given its history and geography.
A similar exercise, applied to the Gulf Coast
as a whole, would serve to pinpoint its vital
role as an oil and commodity gateway to the
Southeast, and to the US as a whole.
Now, at this stage you might say that the
findings are obvious – of course, it’s the job
of any city to protect its citizens, and of every
nation to recognize its vital economic
interests. True enough – but on a practical
basis, there is a world of difference between a
particular agency tasked with maintaining the
levees, and an entire municipality that
understands the vital role of the levees and is
equipped to act on that understanding.
In the former case, the agency, disconnected
from other elements of a bureaucracy, is free
to make incremental decisions, filter
information according to a partial
understanding of consequences, and, in the
most well intentioned way, fail to understand
the full scope of the risk. In the latter case,
the risk is understood – because the
municipality is sensing and acting as a whole,
based on a complete understanding of what is
at stake.
Considered in those terms – whole versus
partial response – it becomes evident why, in
traditional organizational structures, it is so
difficult for agencies and individuals to act on
information. A warning that a Category Five
hurricane might threaten the levee system
sounds dire – and causes genuine alarm – but
then loses its impact, because no particular
agency is really able to look at its mandate (for
example, the integrity of the levees) in the
context of the overall health and well being of
the city.
Moving Beyond the “Habitual” and the
“Partial” – Thinking of the Whole
e are singling out New Orleans here
because it provides a vital and
immediate example – but in these
respects it is no different from most other
municipalities or most other organizations.
The habitual and the partial are dominant in
most organizational life. To think differently
– to think in terms of the whole – is urgently
important, but in practice extremely difficult
to achieve. For proof, we have only to look
again at Katrina, from a national perspective –
the failure to understand the complex of vital
economic interests, such as petroleum
production, in the region and act to protect
them originates, again, in a fragmented
perspective, which leads to a fragmented
response.
The situation of the Gulf Coast and its role as
a petroleum gateway is more complex. In the
aftermath of Katrina it seemed that capacity
would recover quickly. The arrival of Rita
was an additional severe stressor that has
further challenged the ability of the system to
respond. There are likely to be negative
economic consequences as a result of the
serious and extended disruption in shipment,
refining and distribution. Nevertheless –
taking all the disruption into account – the
system as a whole does now seem to be
responding.
W
CITY OF NEW ORLEANS: WHAT HURRICANE KATRINA CAN TEACH US ABOUT RESILIENCE 4
Stephen F. DeAngelis – President and CEO, Enterra Solutions, LLC
This article originally appeared in The Newsletter by Thomas P.M. Barnett, October 10, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Enterra Solutions, LLC. All rights reserved
The experience will not be without pain – but
it will probably not be catastrophic. To the
extent that economic consequences are
contained, it will be because an entire system
– comprised of the federal government,
petroleum producers, tanker operators, the
financial sector – is responding in a holistic
way. Capacity is being shifted, reserves are
being released, financial risk absorbed or
distributed – in part as a result of government
fiat, and in part because of incentives built
into the private-sector elements of the system.
That is what we refer to as resilience. We
define resilience as the ability of a system to
absorb a blow and quickly regain its shape.
That a system is resilient does not imply that it
is immune to negative impacts – rather that,
in the face of such an impact, it recovers
quickly. A resilient system bends but does not
break. Resilient systems are those that can
draw on all their resources, quickly,
consistently and effectively – putting them at
the service of their overall well being. Resilient
systems and organizations are designed to be a
quantum leap better at responding to stressors than
threat actors are at creating asymmetric threats.
The response to the hurricane-related oil
shock may in time prove to be an example of
resilience (the open question is how another
part of the system – the overall economic
system – will react, especially as other
stressors, such as Fall and Winter
temperatures, impact the price of home
heating oil and thus affect consumer
spending, home building and housing prices).
Other Examples
ew York, in the immediate aftermath
of the September 11 attacks, did a
better job of New Orleans at getting
back on its feet. There are reasons for this.
The damage caused on September 11, while
horrifying, was confined to a relatively small
geographic area. Much more of the city’s
infrastructure – its transportation system, for
example – still worked. So the two events are
not exactly comparable. Nevertheless, there
were qualities in New York’s response – the
willingness of ferry operators, for example, to
improvise service over three days,
transporting refugees out, then transporting
firefighters, construction workers and
equipment in; the willingness of ironworkers
and other volunteers to show up by the
hundreds, unasked, in an environmentally
hostile location, on the night immediately
after the attacks, and go to work on the rescue
and recovery effort – that also serve to
illustrate resilience of the individual and the
ecosystem. New York – admittedly a
wealthier and less damaged city – was able to
bring more of its resources to bear sooner.
That was the basis of its resilient response.
The central question is, how do we equip
other cities – and states, and organizations,
and the federal government – to be resilient?
How do we train individuals and create a
culture – like New York – that has resilience
built into its interpersonal and organizational
DNA? Resilience is of limited value if it
remains an accidental quality. The point of
Enterprise Resilience Management, as of any
system, is to capture certain qualities – in this
case, the qualities of resilience – and create a
framework in which they can be applied more
consistently by more players – agencies,
private sector organizations, and individuals.
We need to create, not only resilience, but
Resilient EnterprisesTM and resilient
individuals -- businesses, institutions and
people that can act, on their own and in
concert, to protect their vital interests, and
ours.
We have already spoken about the need for
more effective planning – top-down, strategic
and systemic, with relentless focus on the
assets that are most critical to the mission.
Mechanisms are also needed to facilitate
cooperation, coordination and
communication within and between
organizations. One of the sorrier aspects of
the September 11 attacks was the series of
N
CITY OF NEW ORLEANS: WHAT HURRICANE KATRINA CAN TEACH US ABOUT RESILIENCE 5
Stephen F. DeAngelis – President and CEO, Enterra Solutions, LLC
This article originally appeared in The Newsletter by Thomas P.M. Barnett, October 10, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Enterra Solutions, LLC. All rights reserved
communications failures that hampered
emergency response. Over and above that
were the intelligence failures that preceded the
attacks. The same pattern emerged in New
Orleans and the Gulf.
The value of Enterprise Resilience
Management starts with the Integrated Master
PlanTM – a comprehensive analysis and
recommendation that identifies critical assets,
their supporting processes, and the rules that
apply to the processes, aligns that analysis
with the strategic and operational plans of an
organization and its technology architecture,
and establishes the framework for automating
those rules in a Resilient Technology
ArchitectureTM. That value is fully realized in
the technology solution that establishes
information flow among departments, and
serves that information, along with decision-
support tools, to managers at all levels. It is
realized as well in rules automation – the
ability to encode critical processes, in the form
of key rules or instructions, to provide for
automatic response, freeing decision-makers
to concentrate on the most important tasks –
those that require judgment – rather than on
friction-filled, repetitive operations.
The planning, coordination and automation
described here would certainly create value if
applied within agencies. They would create
even more value if applied across agencies.
Of the many lessons of Katrina, perhaps the
most significant is that of interdependence.
New Orleans was dependent on the
coordinated operation of all its agencies in
order to ensure public safety. But it was not
just dependent on those – it was equally
dependent on state agencies (for example, the
development and operation of the state’s
evacuation plan, the availability of National
Guard assets). And both city and state were
dependent on the Federal government –
again, in the planning stages (think of the
many federal evaluations of the levee system)
and in emergency response.
The Role of the System Administrator
atrina shows us, yet again, the vital role
of the military in civilian and economic
life. We have heard extensive
discussion and debate about the military’s
ability to provide for secure infrastructure in
Iraq. Katrina is in some respects a domestic
demonstration that there are certain tasks –
focused on the smooth operation of civilian
life – that only the military can perform. The
role of the military as systems administrator –
as defined by noted defense analyst, New
York Times bestselling author, and Enterra
Solutions Senior Managing Director Dr.
Thomas P. M. Barnett – applies not only in
what Barnett calls the Non-Integrating Gap,
the states and systems that are failing to
integrate into the larger economic community
and all its rule sets. In certain extreme
circumstances – and Katrina was one of them
– it applies as well in the Core – the states and
systems that are actively integrating their
economies into a global economy.
Here is where the need for a rule-set reset
becomes evident. A rule-set reset is Barnett’s
term for the establishment of new rules, in the
form of regulations or best practices, to
address rule-set gaps – deficiencies and
shortfalls in or between existing rule sets. The
application of the principles of Enterprise
Resilience Management to the systems of
New Orleans represents such a rule-set reset.
It is painfully clear that the players involved –
municipalities, states, and the many agencies
of the federal sector – lack the systems that
allow them to cooperate. On a cultural level,
they are devoted to siloed, fragmentary
approaches. And yet the lesson of Katrina –
as of September 11, and of the economic
shocks of the late 1990s, and of the recent
terrorist attacks in London and Bali, and of
the many other system perturbations of the
past five years – is a lesson of
interdependence.
K
CITY OF NEW ORLEANS: WHAT HURRICANE KATRINA CAN TEACH US ABOUT RESILIENCE 6
Stephen F. DeAngelis – President and CEO, Enterra Solutions, LLC
Systems as a whole – organizations,
municipalities, economies, nation-states and
transnational systems – are affected by these
shocks. But public sector agencies – and
most private-sector businesses – lack the
ability to muster a systemic response. They
face – we face – a complexity gap – a gap
between the systemic nature of our challenges,
and our ability to be systemic ourselves. We
need a new paradigm.
Enterprise Resilience Management is the new
paradigm and the answer – not just as a
quality, but as a system. The rule-set reset
that we outline begins with a systemic point of
view. But beyond that, it is literally a new
application of rules – the identification of the
rules that protect critical assets, their
transformation into executable code elements
in such a way that they can be applied
consistently and predictably, and their
extension across organizational architectures
to provide for a truly systemic response. A
new New Orleans demands nothing less.
To rebuild New Orleans is not sufficient if the
rebuilt city is no better able to defend itself
against the next Katrina. New Orleans
requires – and deserves – a next-generation
system that will enable the city to draw on all
of its resources in response to its most critical
needs. A new New Orleans must be a
resilient New Orleans. And the lessons that
move us to create it must be applied beyond
New Orleans – they must be applied to all the
organizations and all the assets that are critical
to the survival of our complex,
interdependent society. The lesson of New
Orleans is that the time for resilience is now.?
If you would like to discuss this matter,
please feel free to contact me at:


Stephen F. DeAngelis
sdeangelis.resilience@enterrasolutions.com
(215) 497-3100 ext. 300

Video Captures Stoning of Kurdish Teenage Girl

GMT 4-25-2007 23:17:5
Assyrian International News Agency
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Mosul, Iraq -- According to the Kurdish website Jebar.info up to 1000 men from the Yezidi Kurdish community of Mosul killed a teenager who's only crime was running away to marry a Muslim man whom she loved and converting to his religion.

For four months ago the girl had been given shelter by a local Muslim Sheik. It was reported that in the last few days her family persuaded her to return home, convincing her that she had been forgiven by her parents and relatives for her mistake.

In a short mobile video clip which appears to have been taken by locals at seen of the murder, the girl is seen being ambushed on her way home by a group of up to 1000 men who were waiting for her to return; the men killed her in the most brutal way possible, by throwing large stones on her head. The following clips show that while she is alive and crying for help she is taunted and kicked in her stomach until someone finishes her off by throwing a large stone on her face.

Warning: the following videos (RealPlayer) show graphic and disturbing images:

video 1
video 2
video 3
video 4
video 5
video 6

From the clips it appears that the girl was first stripped naked to symbolize that she had dishonored her family and her Yezidi religion. She is lying on the road naked while her smashed face is covered with blood and still breathing.

According to the website and footage from the clip a number of armed local police officers were present who in fact helped the crowd to kill the woman rather than preventing the crime. Sometime later the Iraqi army arrived at the scene and refused anyone entry, including the press.

Killing women for reasons of honor, shame and religion does happens in regions of Kurdistan and Iraq. The above incidents are not uncommon in some of the deeply religious and traditional communities. For long violence against women has been commonly used as a political and religious weapon and as a means of social control.

By Kameel Ahmady, Mina Rojdar
www.Kurdishaspect.com

U.S.: Arrest in 'The Bishop' Case
Summary

U.S. law enforcement agencies in Dubuque, Iowa, on April 25 arrested a man they believe to be "The Bishop," a suspect who has sent improvised explosive devices to financial services companies through the mail. Authorities describe the suspect as a 42-year-old former postal worker.

Analysis

U.S. law enforcement agencies in Dubuque, Iowa, on April 25 arrested a man they believe to be "The Bishop," a suspect who has sent improvised explosive devices (IEDs) through the mail. Authorities have identified the suspect as 42-year-old former postal worker John Patrick Tomkins.

The Bishop first appeared on Stratfor's radar screen in 2005 when he was sending anonymous, threatening letters to various financial services companies. The letters demanded that the targeted companies -- financial firms based in the U.S. Midwest -- take action to manipulate specific stocks to a predetermined price, frequently $6.66. The Bishop eventually escalated to sending IEDs through the mail to these companies. The IEDs were complete but intentionally not fully assembled.

According Stratfor sources, analyzing and following stock trading records led U.S. Postal Service investigators to Tomkins. Also, a photograph included in an Oct. 25, 2005, threat letter showed the window of the vehicle from which the photograph was taken. The vehicle was identified as a four-door Chevrolet Lumina. Authorities observed Tomkins driving a red 1993 Chevrolet Lumina. The interior of the vehicle appears to match the vehicle shown in the photograph.
After authorities surveilled the suspect for a lengthy period and built their case, search and arrest warrants were executed. Because of the nature of The Bishop's alleged crimes -- sending IEDs through the mail -- the possibility that he could detonate an IED while being arrested was a major safety concern.

After the arrest warrant was served, authorities in Dubuque evacuated part of an apartment complex when a bomb-sniffing dog stopped at a storage locker connected to the suspect. The apartment complex is located about a mile from the suspect's residence on the west side of town.

Tomkins has been described as a machinist who is married and has three children. This does not fit the original criminal profile compiled by the FBI.
The complaint, filed by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service in U.S. District Court in Northern Illinois, details the evidence allegedly tying Tomkins to the crimes, such as his stock transactions in the companies The Bishop was focused on, credit card and ATM receipts linking him to locations where letters were mailed, handwriting comparisons and credit card receipts showing that he bought materials at a hardware store similar to the components used in constructing the IEDs. Authorities should be able to locate a large amount of additional evidence from their searches of Tomkins' home, storage space, vehicle and computer.

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: April 25, 2007
ISTANBUL, April 24 — Turkey’s ruling party on Tuesday chose a presidential candidate with an Islamic background, a move that will extend the reach of the party — and the emerging class of devout Muslims it represents — into the heart of Turkey’s secular establishment for the first time.

Associated Press
Abdullah Gul with his wife, Hayrunisa, in 2005. His candidacy reflects the secular-religious debate.
The selection has focused the worries of secular Turks who fear that sexual equality, as well as drinking alcohol and wearing miniskirts, could eventually be in danger.

Abdullah Gul, 56, the foreign minister, whose wife wears a Muslim head scarf and who is Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s closest political ally, is expected to be confirmed as president by Parliament in several rounds of voting that begin Friday. That will boost Turkey’s new political class — modernizers from a religious background.

“These are the new forces, the new social powers,” said Ali Bulac, a columnist for a conservative newspaper, Zaman, in Istanbul. “They are very devout. They don’t drink. They don’t gamble. They don’t take holidays. They are loaded with a huge energy. This energy has been blocked by the state.”

Turkey is a Muslim country, but its state, founded in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, is strictly secular, and the presidency is its most important office. The current president is Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a secularist with a judicial background whose term is expiring.

Mr. Gul, an affable English speaker who has long been his party’s public face abroad, nodded to secular concerns in a news conference in Ankara after his nomination, saying, “Our differences are our richness.” His candidacy was a concession: the choice most distasteful to the secular establishment was Mr. Erdogan himself, who deftly bowed out.

Still, if Mr. Gul is confirmed, his party would occupy the posts of president, prime minister and parliamentary speaker, a lineup that the opposition party leader, Deniz Baykal, called “unfavorable.” His party later announced that it would boycott the vote.

In the Middle East, where mixing religion with government has been seen as poisonous for modernity, Turkey’s very light blend stands out as unusual, even unique.

“This party has done more for the modernization of Turkey than all the secular parties in the previous years,” said Joost Lagendijk, a member of the European Parliament who heads a committee on Turkish issues. “They were willing to open up the system, to challenge the elite.”

The party that Mr. Gul helped found, known by its Turkish initials, AK, sprang from the Islamic political movements of the 1990s. But the AK became significantly more moderate after taking power on a national scale in 2002. Since then, it has applied pragmatic policies that helped create an economic boom and opened up the state in ways that the rigid secular elite, which relied heavily on state control, had never imagined, in part to qualify for membership in the European Union.

Although the party is publicly adamant about keeping religion separate from policy, bristling at shorthand descriptions of it as pro-Islamic, it draws much of its support from Turkey’s religiously conservative heartland. Once on the periphery, these traditional Turks are now emerging as a powerful middle class that has driven Turkey’s boom. The economy has nearly doubled in the four years that the AK has been in power, largely because it has stuck to an economic program prescribed by the International Monetary Fund.

Mr. Gul’s candidacy goes to the heart of the secular-religious debate, because the presidency is such a revered symbol with real powers — he is commander in chief and has a veto. Turkish military leaders in the past have remarked that they would refuse to visit the presidential palace if a woman in a head scarf were living in it.

“How can she now become the host of a palace that represents the very same principles?” said Necmi Yuzbasioglu, a professor of constitutional law at Istanbul University.

Mehmet A. Kislali, a columnist with the newspaper Radikal, who has contacts with the military, said: “The military should not be underestimated. Thousands of officers are watching the developments.”

But the party’s only real application of Islam has been its grass-roots approach. In practices that would be familiar to Shiite Muslims in Lebanon or to Palestinians in Gaza, women’s groups go door to door offering aid, community centers offer women’s literacy classes and sports centers give free physical therapy to handicapped children.

The question of religion aside, economic progress under the AK has been extraordinary, with a steady rise in entrepreneurship. In Istanbul, fuel-efficient taxis zip down tulip-lined streets. New parks have sprung up. The air is less polluted.

Mustafa Karaduman, a textile designer and fashion house owner, is among the new entrepreneurs. He is from Anatolia, a capital of middle-class production, and the homeland of Mr. Gul. His fashion house has turned into an empire, supplying Islamic clothing for women in Europe and the Middle East. He is 50, has seven children, and is an outspoken opponent of the miniskirt.

“My mission,” he says, “is to cover all women around the world.”

The country’s wealth has drawn more observant Turks into public life. Some religious schools now teach English, unheard of a decade ago, improving the chances of students from religious backgrounds on university entrance exams.

At the Kartal Anadolu Imam Hatip High School in a conservative middle-class neighborhood, 16-year-old girls in head scarves and sweatshirts played basketball last week in brightly patterned Converse sneakers. (Skulls were a popular choice.) Last year, 94 students were admitted to universities, up from almost none a decade ago, said Hadir Kalkan, the school’s principal, pointing to students’ career choices in marketing, broadcasting, psychology and finance. Just 14 chose to continue religious training.

The city pool and gym in the lower-middle-class neighborhood of Okmeydani is a testament to the ascendancy of the pious middle class. Few observant women attended in 1996, when the pool opened, an attendant said. Now they fill treadmills and lap lanes.

“I always wanted to but there were no places to go,” said Dondu Koc, a 46-year-old in yellow sweat pants as she pedaled an exercise bike in a room full of women on Wednesday. Before Mr. Erdogan’s stewardship as mayor of the city, there was only one public pool. Now there are three, and five are under construction.

The complex is separated by sex, an arrangement Ms. Koc likes because it lets her and other covered women pedal, jog and swim without their head scarves. But the division irritates secular Turks.

“There shouldn’t be a split like this,” said Tamis Demirel, 47, a homemaker whose hair was still wet from her swim. “We sit next to each other; we should swim next to each other, too.”

The remark seemed to answer the question of Elif Demir, a 19-year-old office clerk at a youth rally for Mr. Erdogan on Sunday. “We have no problem with women wearing miniskirts,” she said, “but why are they so bothered with our head scarves?”

That frustration took the form of a public scolding at a meeting on the far edge of Istanbul on Friday night, where a man who supports Mr. Erdogan’s party complained about what he said was weak party support for religious schools.

“What about Koran courses?” he asked a party representative. “We are looking for generations that have morality.”

The apartment where the meeting took place bore the traces of upper-middle-class life: a running machine, a washing machine and a dryer. Brightly colored scarves covered the hair of the hostesses.

The representative, Kenan Danisman, paused as the evening prayer began. He then offered some pragmatic advice. “If you transfer this prayer into practical support, in three to five years, the problems that hurt peoples’ consciences will be resolved.”

It is precisely the open question of religion’s role in society that makes secular Turks so uncomfortable. Mr. Erdogan may be explicit in his opposition to Islam’s entering policy, but what about the rank and file who are filling jobs in public administration — what is their view of sexual equality? Secular Turks worry that their conservative worldview will lead to a reinterpretation of the rules and lower tolerance for a secular lifestyle.

“People like me are not calculating the economy or what sort of policies they are making,” said Basak Caglayan, 35, a financial consultant who will be married next month. “The life we expect, we want, for our children, is changing. I worry about that.”

Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.