Soccer as the hope of Iraq

As some of you have heard, Iraq beat South Korea yesterday to advance to the Asian cup finals. The celebration in Iraq, however was marred by suicide attacks that killed many Iraqis as they celebrated the countries soccer victory. That however, should not be the focus of the news, since one thing that stood out, more than the violence, was how the victory of the Iraqi soccer team united Iraqis of every background in celebration. As Tony Karon notes in Time, even the Kurds waved Iraqi flags in celebration.

The team is made up of Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis and in some ways can be seen as a reflection of the hope of a future Iraq. The hope, that when Iraqis of all stripes work together, they can achieve great things. Soccer, for the rest of the world is not only about sports, or competition, when national teams face one another, they are in essence representing and defending the honor of their country.

The time article notes that celebrations were widespread in the country, and reunited old friends from different sectarian backgrounds in celebration after not having seen each other in more than two years due to the sectarian violence tearing the country apart. If anything, the celebrations show two things. One, despite the religiously based violence, Iraqis still hold on to a fickle Iraqi identity, and two, even as soccer unites them, there are those who still seek to tear the country apart. The question that remains to be answered is, whether Iraqi identity is strong enough to withstand the challenges arrayed against it, or if like in the case of Yugoslavia (where though the national team would have benefited from its unity as a state) it will still tear itself apart.

As Karon puts it:

Soccer cannot bridge political divides that are based not simply on whether Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds can get along and pass the ball to one another, but on how power and control of territory and resources is to be arranged among them. As beautiful a moment as Iraq's shared celebration may have been, the danger remains that they're less akin to Ivory Coast's example of rapprochement than they are to the legendary Christmas 1914 soccer match on World War I's Western Front. That game, played between German and British soldiers in no man's land amid a remarkable unofficial yuletide truce, expressed the shared humanity among the combatants of both sides. And then they went back to slaughtering each other for another four years.

As a final note, it is interesting that the final match will be against Saudi Arabia. Given the amount of foreign fighters that come from Saudi, and the fact that al Qaeda's rigid ideological roots owe a lot to that country, it's almost as if the soccer match can also be seen as yet another way in which Saudi Arabia stands as an obstacle to the hope that Iraq could be.