If ever there was an example of a sporting event bearing a wider social significance, then Iraq’s heroic victory in football’s Asia Cup would be it. The Iraqi team have not only scored one of the history’s great sporting achievements but have also produced a symbolic event of substantial weight. Because right in the middle of one of the worst civil wars in living memory, their victory has provided both their nation and world with a shining example of the strength of that most beleaguered and underrated of Iraqi political trends: pan-ethnic and pan-sectarian nationalism.
But before considering the wider political context, let’s start by considering this greatest of sporting achievements. Refugees from their home country, the Iraqi team was prepared for the tournament by their Brazilian manager Jorvan Vieira from the Iraq Football Association’s makeshift base in a Jordan hotel lobby. Vieira told the Guardian recently “I don’t have one person in this group who hasn’t lost someone from their family because of this war”. (1) The players ply their trade with unfashionable clubs in the Middle East and Cyprus, far from the high-level football and the outrageous salaries of the club game’s pinnacle – the European Champions League. In short, Iraq were nobody’s favourites going into the tournament.
And yet these global minnows became continental champions, slaying comparative giants on their road to glory. They finished top of their first round group, winning 3-1 against an Australian side that had itself come within a whisker of knocking Italy, the eventual champions, out of last summer’s World Cup. After beating joint hosts Vietnam in the quarter-finals, Iraq then beat South Korea on penalties in a hard-fought semi. Recall that South Korea’s impressively mobile and technical side reached the World Cup semi finals five years ago, beating Portugal, Italy and Spain along the way. Frankly, Iraq had no business taking these scalps. But take them they did.
So to a final against rivals and neighbours Saudi Arabia. And it would have been a hard heart indeed that was left unmoved by the sight of Iraqi captain Younes Mahmoud charging in at the far post to power an unstoppable header past the Saudi keeper, thus securing a fairytale victory that sent his country into raptures. A more emphatic, more viscerally satisfying way to claim the prize than Mahmoud’s imperious, thumping header could not have been imagined. As the net bulged, millions of Iraqis watching the game on television flew up from their chairs, arms aloft, their hearts seized by a long-forgotton feeling: joy.
The team’s successes caused scenes in Iraq of a kind totally opposite to those normally associated with that tortured country. McClatchy reported that after the victory over Vietnam, “Police danced at checkpoints and gunmen fired their weapons in celebration … thousands of jubilant Iraqis poured into the streets of Baghdad” as an “impromptu citywide parade” began. “Children, typically shut indoors for their protection, whooped and jumped in the middle of intersections. Iraqi women trilled from balconies, while throngs of ecstatic young men peeled off their shirts and waved them in the air”. (2)
Before the South Korea game, one Iraqi, Ibrahim al-Musawi, told Reuters, “This is one of the strongest Iraqi sides ever and they fill us with pride…We are tired of the sadness that always surrounds us. I sometimes wish we are always playing in international tournaments so we can remain happy”. (3)
Bringing such rare happiness to their compatriots was in itself an act of heroism on the part of the national team. But beyond the sporting achievement and the pleasure it brought to so many people in desperate need of the smallest chance to experience such feelings, there is another significance to the rise of the “Lions of Mesopotamia”. For as manager Vieira points out “I have different groups [in the team], different sects, like in Iraq, but here nothing happens and everything is OK. I have Sunni and I have Shia and there is no problem. They are very close”. The Lions’ achievement is the achievement of a united Iraq; a nation dismissed by many Western pundits as a doomed colonial fabrication but one cherished, even now, by a great many ordinary Iraqis. “By this game, we are united! By this game, we are defiant!” chanted one group of youths, wrapped in Iraqi flags. After the final, that flag could be seen flying all over the country – even in the famously independent Kurdish north.
This comes as political nationalism in Iraq appears to be beginning a tentative resurgence. Writing for US political weekly The Nation, Robert Dreyfuss recently observed that notions of Iraq’s inevitable demise as a unified state “are being challenged by a nascent bloc of Iraqi nationalists who, against all odds, are working to put together a pan-Iraqi coalition that would topple the US-backed government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Maliki’s ruling alliance includes separatist Kurdish warlords and Iranian-backed Shiite fundamentalists, both of whom want to carve out semi or wholly independent statelets. Although it has not yet jelled, Maliki’s opposition—which includes Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, as well as Christians, Turkmen and others—is within striking distance of creating a functioning parliamentary majority. More important, outside Parliament the nationalists represent an overwhelming majority of rank-and-file Iraqis.” (4)
In addition, a political front has emerged uniting several of the nationalist groups within the Iraqi insurgency who condemn sectarianism and the killing of civilians. This evokes the early days of the insurgency in Spring 2004, when a palpable sense of pan-Iraqi nationalism could be observed among those sympathetic to the various guerrilla groups fighting Western forces from Sunni Anbar province to the Shia south. (5) One of the guerrilla leaders told the Guardian last month, “Our position is that there are two kinds of people in Iraq: not Sunni and Shia, Kurdish and Arab, Muslim and Christian, but those who are with the occupation and those who are against it…… the innocent must not be touched.” (6) The group’s aim is to join other nationalist anti-occupation forces to negotiate an American withdrawal, and then hold free elections for a new independent government.
Plainly no amount of victories on the football field can end the American occupation, defeat sectarian forces or rebuild Iraq’s shattered society. But the Iraqi team’s victories speak eloquently, and forcefully, in favour of that nation’s best hope for a better future – a unified nationalism crossing ethnic, religious and tribal lines with the strength to defeat both the occupation and the sectarian terrorists and death squads. As 1920’s nationalist revolution against British rule demonstrated, a popular sense of patriotism has been present in Iraq since very early in the life of the country. If it is an idea whose time has come again, then the national football team will have played a significant role in rekindling it in the nation’s heart. The power of symbolism in politics should never be underestimated. Nor should the emotional power of sport, and its capacity to produce such potent symbols.
Of course, it may be that it is simply too late for Iraqi nationalism. Iraq is, after all, ruled not by its people but by an astoundingly unscrupulous political class who have rejected any notion of civil society in the public realm in favour of a self-enriching communitarian feudalism. Furthermore, the American occupier that stands above these politicians is unlikely to welcome a nationalism whose first goal will be the expulsion of all foreign armies from Iraq.
However, if the worst does happen, civil war continues and the Iraqi nation meets a painful and divisive end, then the success of the Iraqi football team should at least help to remind us of one thing. Iraq’s disintegration was not inevitable or preordained. The war the West started and the removal of the “strongman” Saddam did not simply provide the context in which the natural Iraqi state of affairs – communitarian antipathy – could re-assert itself. Such superficial and self-serving views should not obscure the reality that Iraq, at least at one time, had within it social bonds strong enough to hold that country together. The fact is that all nations have – and live with – their own demographic complexities. It is instability, violence, economic deprivation and other failures of the state that turns those complexities into divisions and causes fragmentation. Few societies could have suffered what Iraq has suffered over the years and survived intact.
As we watch the red, white and black tricolour fluttering above crowds of briefly joyful Iraqi football fans, we would do well to reflect that if their dreams of unity are broken it will be, in no small part, because of our own governments’ policies and not because of any cultural or sociological deficiencies on Iraq’s part. In those heartening celebrations, one hopes that we have glimpsed something that might yet prevail, and not merely something that we have already destroyed.
If ever there was an example of a sporting event bearing a wider social significance, then Iraq’s heroic victory in football’s Asia Cup would be it. The Iraqi team have not only scored one of the history’s great sporting achievements but have also produced a symbolic event of substantial weight. Because right in the middle of one of the worst civil wars in living memory, their victory has provided both their nation and world with a shining example of the strength of that most beleaguered and underrated of Iraqi political trends: pan-ethnic and pan-sectarian nationalism.
But before considering the wider political context, let’s start by considering this greatest of sporting achievements. Refugees from their home country, the Iraqi team was prepared for the tournament by their Brazilian manager Jorvan Vieira from the Iraq Football Association’s makeshift base in a Jordan hotel lobby. Vieira told the Guardian recently “I don’t have one person in this group who hasn’t lost someone from their family because of this war”. (1) The players ply their trade with unfashionable clubs in the Middle East and Cyprus, far from the high-level football and the outrageous salaries of the club game’s pinnacle – the European Champions League. In short, Iraq were nobody’s favourites going into the tournament.
And yet these global minnows became continental champions, slaying comparative giants on their road to glory. They finished top of their first round group, winning 3-1 against an Australian side that had itself come within a whisker of knocking Italy, the eventual champions, out of last summer’s World Cup. After beating joint hosts Vietnam in the quarter-finals, Iraq then beat South Korea on penalties in a hard-fought semi. Recall that South Korea’s impressively mobile and technical side reached the World Cup semi finals five years ago, beating Portugal, Italy and Spain along the way. Frankly, Iraq had no business taking these scalps. But take them they did.
So to a final against rivals and neighbours Saudi Arabia. And it would have been a hard heart indeed that was left unmoved by the sight of Iraqi captain Younes Mahmoud charging in at the far post to power an unstoppable header past the Saudi keeper, thus securing a fairytale victory that sent his country into raptures. A more emphatic, more viscerally satisfying way to claim the prize than Mahmoud’s imperious, thumping header could not have been imagined. As the net bulged, millions of Iraqis watching the game on television flew up from their chairs, arms aloft, their hearts seized by a long-forgotton feeling: joy.
The team’s successes caused scenes in Iraq of a kind totally opposite to those normally associated with that tortured country. McClatchy reported that after the victory over Vietnam, “Police danced at checkpoints and gunmen fired their weapons in celebration … thousands of jubilant Iraqis poured into the streets of Baghdad” as an “impromptu citywide parade” began. “Children, typically shut indoors for their protection, whooped and jumped in the middle of intersections. Iraqi women trilled from balconies, while throngs of ecstatic young men peeled off their shirts and waved them in the air”. (2)
Before the South Korea game, one Iraqi, Ibrahim al-Musawi, told Reuters, “This is one of the strongest Iraqi sides ever and they fill us with pride…We are tired of the sadness that always surrounds us. I sometimes wish we are always playing in international tournaments so we can remain happy”. (3)
Bringing such rare happiness to their compatriots was in itself an act of heroism on the part of the national team. But beyond the sporting achievement and the pleasure it brought to so many people in desperate need of the smallest chance to experience such feelings, there is another significance to the rise of the “Lions of Mesopotamia”. For as manager Vieira points out “I have different groups [in the team], different sects, like in Iraq, but here nothing happens and everything is OK. I have Sunni and I have Shia and there is no problem. They are very close”. The Lions’ achievement is the achievement of a united Iraq; a nation dismissed by many Western pundits as a doomed colonial fabrication but one cherished, even now, by a great many ordinary Iraqis. “By this game, we are united! By this game, we are defiant!” chanted one group of youths, wrapped in Iraqi flags. After the final, that flag could be seen flying all over the country – even in the famously independent Kurdish north.
This comes as political nationalism in Iraq appears to be beginning a tentative resurgence. Writing for US political weekly The Nation, Robert Dreyfuss recently observed that notions of Iraq’s inevitable demise as a unified state “are being challenged by a nascent bloc of Iraqi nationalists who, against all odds, are working to put together a pan-Iraqi coalition that would topple the US-backed government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. Maliki’s ruling alliance includes separatist Kurdish warlords and Iranian-backed Shiite fundamentalists, both of whom want to carve out semi or wholly independent statelets. Although it has not yet jelled, Maliki’s opposition—which includes Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, as well as Christians, Turkmen and others—is within striking distance of creating a functioning parliamentary majority. More important, outside Parliament the nationalists represent an overwhelming majority of rank-and-file Iraqis.” (4)
In addition, a political front has emerged uniting several of the nationalist groups within the Iraqi insurgency who condemn sectarianism and the killing of civilians. This evokes the early days of the insurgency in Spring 2004, when a palpable sense of pan-Iraqi nationalism could be observed among those sympathetic to the various guerrilla groups fighting Western forces from Sunni Anbar province to the Shia south. (5) One of the guerrilla leaders told the Guardian last month, “Our position is that there are two kinds of people in Iraq: not Sunni and Shia, Kurdish and Arab, Muslim and Christian, but those who are with the occupation and those who are against it…… the innocent must not be touched.” (6) The group’s aim is to join other nationalist anti-occupation forces to negotiate an American withdrawal, and then hold free elections for a new independent government.
Plainly no amount of victories on the football field can end the American occupation, defeat sectarian forces or rebuild Iraq’s shattered society. But the Iraqi team’s victories speak eloquently, and forcefully, in favour of that nation’s best hope for a better future – a unified nationalism crossing ethnic, religious and tribal lines with the strength to defeat both the occupation and the sectarian terrorists and death squads. As 1920’s nationalist revolution against British rule demonstrated, a popular sense of patriotism has been present in Iraq since very early in the life of the country. If it is an idea whose time has come again, then the national football team will have played a significant role in rekindling it in the nation’s heart. The power of symbolism in politics should never be underestimated. Nor should the emotional power of sport, and its capacity to produce such potent symbols.
Of course, it may be that it is simply too late for Iraqi nationalism. Iraq is, after all, ruled not by its people but by an astoundingly unscrupulous political class who have rejected any notion of civil society in the public realm in favour of a self-enriching communitarian feudalism. Furthermore, the American occupier that stands above these politicians is unlikely to welcome a nationalism whose first goal will be the expulsion of all foreign armies from Iraq.
However, if the worst does happen, civil war continues and the Iraqi nation meets a painful and divisive end, then the success of the Iraqi football team should at least help to remind us of one thing. Iraq’s disintegration was not inevitable or preordained. The war the West started and the removal of the “strongman” Saddam did not simply provide the context in which the natural Iraqi state of affairs – communitarian antipathy – could re-assert itself. Such superficial and self-serving views should not obscure the reality that Iraq, at least at one time, had within it social bonds strong enough to hold that country together. The fact is that all nations have – and live with – their own demographic complexities. It is instability, violence, economic deprivation and other failures of the state that turns those complexities into divisions and causes fragmentation. Few societies could have suffered what Iraq has suffered over the years and survived intact.
As we watch the red, white and black tricolour fluttering above crowds of briefly joyful Iraqi football fans, we would do well to reflect that if their dreams of unity are broken it will be, in no small part, because of our own governments’ policies and not because of any cultural or sociological deficiencies on Iraq’s part. In those heartening celebrations, one hopes that we have glimpsed something that might yet prevail, and not merely something that we have already destroyed.
David Wearing’s website is www.democratsdiary.co.uk
Notes
(1) “‘If some of these players go home they will be killed‘”, The Guardian, 30 June 2007
(2) “Jubilant Iraqis celebrate their soccer team”, McClatchy Newspapers, 21 July 2007
(3) “Soccer-Iraqi fans stock up on petrol and ammunition”, Reuters, 24 July 2007
(4) Robert Dreyfuss, “Saving Iraq”, The Nation, 27 June 2007
(5) “Sunnis and Shias Uniting Against U.S.”, Inter Press Service, 14 May 2004
(6) “Out of the shadows”, The Guardian, 19 July 2007