Theocracy in Mosul, plutocracy in Washington: different ideologies, disturbingly familiar ambitions.
ISIS sought to remake Mosul through religious absolutism and terror. Trump’s emerging oligarchy has pursued a different but equally consequential ambition: replacing America’s established institutions with a system of concentrated wealth, executive supremacy, and political domination. Its grip may be weakening, but the struggle to undo the damage is only beginning.
Mosul, cheek-by-jowl with the biblical Nineveh, is steeped in thousands of years of successive empires. Mosul takes prominence as the capital of the ancient Assyrian Empire in 612 B.C., followed by two centuries of Persian monarchs, then the Turkish Seleucids, Romans, then more Persians and three centuries of major Arab caliphates and then the Seljuk Turks, next Mongols and Turkmen, finally the Turkish Ottomans, and capped off historically by a Post WWI British Mandate and the so-called Modern Era. You might say Nineveh and Mosul began life even longer ago when the Old Testament tells us God dispatched Jonah as his emissary to cure the city’s original wickedness (after he was spit up by the whale onto dry land).
In June of 2014, ISIS attacked Mosul, destroyed many of its ancient treasures, occupied the city and began a documented reign of horror that tops other such accounts of inhumanity. Two years later, in 2016 a coalition under US leadership liberated Mosul, drove out ISIS, but at the cost of the city’s utter destruction. The unspeakable horrors of what ISIS did while there are painfully recounted in a recent book, Mosul Eye, by Omar Mohammed. It is a tale of grisly, bone-chilling evil by men who, as unparalleled monsters of human hate, were driven on to orgastic heights of deprivation by religion-inspired vengeance. It was the kind of sickness that often can only issue from a human who believes he is seized by and acting in God’s name.
ISIS’s goal was to remake Mosul society in the name of an angry god, replacing existing rules, morals, methods and its rich diversity of Arabs, Jews, Kurds, and others, with their own system. ISIS sought to establish a religious, simplistic, homogeneous, monocultural society. In effect, ultimate power in the hands of a few. A foul smelling, ignorant force of unalloyed wickedness underwritten not by man but a corrupt misinterpretation of their vengeful deity.
In America over the past 22 months we have witnessed the evolution of a scheme, thankfully unlike the mad religionists, but which rests on a similar theme, to replace existing rules with new ones, without moderating charity, decency, or human caring. Underwritten in principle by Donald Trump, but packed with details drawn from a blueprint devised by a small group of mostly men that constituted a kind of caliphate, one of opulence, extravagant means and abundance.
In this new caliphate’s effort to create this newly anointed “supreme council of wealth,” they specifically chose to condemn the comforts and the pursuit of happiness for the masses. We have been recently calling it an oligarchy or plutocracy, a kind of caliphate that seizes not only a nation’s wealth but its organs of direction, formularies of policy, and concentration of whimsically applied power. The argument is about the impulse to replace an existing order and concentrate power, certainly not moral equivalence between the two movements.
The supreme council of wealth draws on the concept of extreme wealth accrued remorselessly at the expense of some 300 million others, its verse taken from the informed hierarchy of the Unitary Executive, and at ready disposal a quiver of the meanest, vile language and name-calling to whip up the public’s adherence to the new ideological dominionism.
The emerging coda to Trump’s new caliphate, however, seems to spell some relief. This mid-term election is like a successful conclusion to a rehab stretch; the real challenge comes after, when our hopefully reconstituted legislature takes the reins and undoes the stranglehold the new caliphate of supreme wealth has wrought upon the United States.
History is remarkably consistent on one point: no caliphate, no oligarchy, no self-appointed dominion over others lasts forever. But the departure of its architects does not restore what they destroyed. That work falls to those who remain, and to those who are willing to reclaim the institutions that were theirs all along. Now we need the recovery and restoration.
Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 450 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.
