Proxy Soccer

Dog-fighting in football, point-shaving in basketball, and blood-doping in cycling have conspired to make it a rather rough week for sports, a week in which the smaller gems in which games and politics intersect can be ignored or relegated as coincidental or superficial. Still, though, the relatively "clean" sport of soccer--if cigarette smoking on the field (occasionally) and bench (almost always) and spectator riots can be set aside--has contributed its own poetic wrinkle to a wild week in July.

Like world soccer, which can effectively be broken down and digested along either European or South American lines, Asian soccer is also a rather bipolar institution, with success tending to coalesce around a Tokyo-Seoul axis in the east and a Riyadh-Baghdad-Tehran axis in the west. (Turkey, a legitimate soccer power, competes in UEFA, the European federation.) The vast swaths of central and south Asia are bushkazi and cricket country, respectively, and what we once monolithically referred to as Indochina for Cold War/hotbed of Communism purposes can still be monolithically considered as a hotbed for very good, but not great, soccer. Atop this rubric, though, we can now lay a third, more gossamer web, the Baghdad-Hanoi-Seoul-Tokyo alliance, or, rather, the brotherhood of nations who've withstood (or are currently withstanding) American invasion.

In one of those historical moments that simply cannot be scripted--anti-crack cocaine crusader Marion Barry's arrest for possession of crack cocaine is one such moment--the knock-out round of the Asian Football Confederation's (AFC) Asian Cup 2007 has proven to be a doozy.

Four nations--Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam--collaborated to host the tournament, which began on July 7 and ends this Sunday with the championship match in Jakarta between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. That the U.S. quagmire in Iraq has not affected that nation's soccer success is old news; at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, the Under-23 (years old) Iraqi squad finished surprisingly well, upsetting Portugal, Costa Rica, and Australia en route to a fourth-place finish after a loss to Italy in the bronze medal match, a game that happened to be contested one day after an Italian journalist, Enzo Baldoni, had been gruesomely murdered by Sunni insurgents near Najaf.

This year's Asian Cup has proven no less poetic--if, though, more of a satire than a tragedy. After advancing past group play with a win over Australia and a pair of ties against Thailand and Oman, Iraq drew--cue Orff's O Fortuna--Vietnam in the quarterfinals. Imagine a hypothetical match at the Pentagon squash courts pitting Gen. Petraeus and the late Gen. Westmoreland. Iraq won 2-0 in front of nearly 10,000 fans in Bangkok and advanced to the semifinals against--cue Orff--South Korea (Petraeus vs. MacArthur). On July 25 at Kuala Lumpur, Iraq defeated the Koreans 4-3 in a penalty shoot-out to advance to this Sunday's final against the Saudis.

Granted, it's only soccer, but it is somewhat odd to watch the Iraqi team engage its American proxy-war cousins on the field of play, one right after the other. Latin American soccer is a passionate enterprise indeed, but this summer's Gold Cup matches between fellow proxy-war states Cuba and Honduras or El Salvador and Guatemala just don't have the geopolitical gravity that the Iraq-Vietnam and Iraq-Korea games have. U.S. involvement in Central America and the Caribbean was, after all, sold to us as "limited" and "covert," too dissimilar from the full-fledged wars we proudly sought out in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq.

Will there come a time when a team can progress through its federation's championship by only playing teams that have been politically and militarily undermined by the United States? As Iraq is proving this week, and with constant grumblings about "who's next" stirring from CSIS and the American Enterprise Institute, it's not too ridiculous of a proposition.