Since I”ve already had the hubris to make a political endorsement (as in, I’m not sure my FAMILY is going to vote for Briley, much less anyone not connected by blood), it’s time to aim higher: peace between the Sunnis, the Shia, and the Kurdish tribes of northern Iraq.
Forget the police force - the police force is riddled with militia members of the various sects. The Salem’s Lot plan? Help the Iraq team win the World Cup in 2008.
The Iraqi team won the Asian Cup over the weekend, and for a few brief hours, most citizens of Iraq were Iraqi, not Shia, Sunni or Kurd. Celebratory dancing in the streets and much display of the Iraqi flag. Yeah, there was a lot of gunfire, but the shots were fired in glee instead of venom. Yeah, there were a few extremists who refused to join in the fun (two car bombs midst the revelry) and four people got killed because of gravity (bullets fired up must come down), but the country danced as ‘one’.
Let’s ensure that the soccer team has the best training facilities in the world. Maybe Beckham could change his name and dye his hair for the cause. I dunno, but sports has the ability to do what few other endeavors have accomplished - bringing people together.
Let’s go ‘Lion of the Two Rings’!!
The soccer team was a mixed bag of Sunni, Shia and Kurd.
2 Comments
July 30, 2007 at 9:34 am
[...] John Hutcheson has a ironclad plan for uniting the various factions in Iraq: Forget the police force - the police force is riddled with militia members of the various sects. The Salem’s Lot plan? Help the Iraq team win the World Cup in 2008. [...]
July 31, 2007 at 5:39 pm
My husband and I were talking about this last night. When Iran unified around wrestling, the country was plunged into conservative religious turmoil shortly thereafter. And when Argentina and Brazil crafted a cross-class and trans-racial national identity around soccer, they both had hard-right military dictatorships in place. (Mexico had the Yes party and the Yes Sir party — not the most liberal of democracies.) France or Italy winning the World Cup? Sucks to be an African immigrant in either place. Let’s not forget our own obsession with sports — the more sporty our culture gets, the more right-wing we tend to be, politically.
I am thinking that while nation-building through sport works (after a fashion, at least for men…there’s a surprising amount written about this in sports history circles), it would probably not produce the kind of national identity that would spawn the liberal democracy that you or I might hope for.
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