军事:伊战暴露美国实力局限

Iraq remains the subject of visceral polemic 10 years after George W.?Bush and Tony Blair launched their misbegotten and mendaciously sold war of choice to remove Saddam Hussein and, by their lights, reshape the Middle East. The invasion and occupation of Iraq unlocked forces with long-term consequences. Given the staggering obtuseness that marked the entire enterprise, one cannot be sure but one assumes few of them were intended by its Anglo-American artificers.

10年前，乔治·W·布什(George W. Bush)和托尼?布莱尔(Tony Blair)以虚假说词为依据，贸然发起了可打可不打的伊拉克战争，目的是推翻萨达姆?侯赛因(Saddam Hussein)，而且按照他们的说法，还要重塑中东。10年后的今天，伊拉克依然引发激烈争论。入侵并占领伊拉克释放了具有长期后果的力量。鉴于整件事极其愚蠢，我们只能假设，目前局面并非英美设计者的初衷。

The devastation visited upon a country already made prostrate by wars, sanctions and tyranny did not so much shock and awe as offer a pitilessly public spectacle of the limits to US power (Britain’s role as spear-carrier was a sideshow).

伊拉克这个国家早已在连年战争、制裁和暴政的摧残下元气尽失，10年前燃起的战火与其说带来多么严重的震慑，不如说无情地向世人展现了美国实力的局限（跑龙套的英国只是配角）。

No one is blind to the military might the US possesses in unique abundance. But after Iraq there are real doubts – seemingly in America as well as the wider world – about its ability to use this power competently to shape intractable events (current agonising over whether to arm Syrian rebels comes to mind). When future historians date the end of the brief, post-cold war, unipolar moment, they will surely pinpoint Iraq.

美国军事力量之强，独一无二，这一点谁也无法忽视。但在伊战之后，似乎无论是在美国国内还是在全世界，人们都真切地怀疑，美国有没有能力恰当地运用这种实力来影响棘手的事件（目前各方为要不要武装叙利亚反政府武装伤脑筋就是一例）。当未来的历史学家标注冷战后短暂的单极世界终结日期时，他们无疑会瞄准伊拉克战争。

By breaking and entering Iraq, the coalition of the willing also upended the balance of power in the most combustible region in the world. The least important aspect of this was the final dismantling of an already much diminished power (Saddam’s Iraq) that had been a menace to western allies in Israel and the Gulf.

“意愿联盟”(coalition of the willing)入侵伊拉克，还颠覆了世界上最易燃地区的力量平衡。此举产生的结果中，最不重要的结果就是最终推翻了早已遭到严重削弱的萨达姆政权，此前该政权对西方在以色列和海湾地区的盟友构成威胁。

The bigger impact of the invasion was to catapult the Shia minority within Islam (a majority in Iraq) to power in an Arab heartland nation for the first time since the fall of the Fatimid caliphate in 1171. As well as leading to a sectarian bloodbath in Iraq, this reignited with a millenarian spin the simmering conflict between Sunni and Shia, from the Levant to the Gulf and across to the Indian subcontinent.

入侵产生的更大影响是，伊斯兰中的少数派什叶派（在伊拉克人口中占多数）自1171年法蒂玛王朝覆灭以来，首次在阿拉伯心脏地带的一个国家攫取了权力。除了导致伊拉克发生宗派杀戮外，这还重燃了持续千年的逊尼派与什叶派之间的冲突——从黎凡特到海湾地区，甚至波及印度次大陆。

The assault on Iraq, while purportedly striking a decisive blow in the “war on terror”, managed to proliferate the anti-western bigotry and messianic jihadism franchised by Osama bin Laden, and immeasurably strengthen the aggressive Shia theocrats in Iran, the main beneficiary of the war.

尽管攻打伊拉克被吹嘘为在“反恐战争”中发起致命一击，但结果却使奥萨马?本?拉登(Osama Bin Laden)散播的偏执的反西方情绪和救世圣战主义愈演愈烈，还不可估量地加强了伊朗激进的什叶派神权统治者（他们是这场战争的主要受益者）。

Iraq certainly did change the region’s parameters. The overarching conflict between Sunni and Shia, as well as the stand-off between Israel and Iran, now a regional power and threat to Israeli hegemony, are among its main dynamic variables – and they are dynamite.

无疑，伊拉克战争改变了该地区的参数。主要的动态变量包括逊尼派与什叶派之间压倒一切的冲突，以及以色列与伊朗之间的对峙。现在伊朗已经成为区域大国，威胁到以色列的霸权。这些冲突都是中东的火药桶。

In Syria, for example, a downtrodden people inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya is fighting for its freedom from the tyranny of Bashar al-Assad, who is prepared to wade through their blood to stay in power. But the majority of Syrians are Sunni. The rulers of the Gulf and the Sunni supremacists of the Arabian peninsula are backing them in large part to take out the Assad regime, built around the heterodox Shia Alawite sect and allied with both Iran and the Lebanese Shia Hizbollah movement, Tehran’s spearhead in the Levant.

例如，在叙利亚，受压迫的人民在突尼斯、埃及和利比亚革命的鼓舞下，正在反抗为了坐稳江山而不惜大开杀戒的巴沙尔?阿萨德(Bashar al-Assad)的暴政，争取自由。但叙利亚人以逊尼派为主。海湾国家的统治者以及阿拉伯半岛的逊尼至上主义者正在支持叙利亚的起义者，这在很大程度上是为了推翻阿萨德政权，因为阿萨德政权的根基是异端的什叶派分支阿拉维派，该政权与伊朗以及黎巴嫩的什叶派真主党(Hizbollah)运动结盟（真主党是伊朗在黎凡特地区的先锋）。

The 1956 Suez crisis, to which the Iraq fiasco is often compared, had nothing like this long-term significance. In that last hurrah, Britain and France, the sinking colonial powers who were the main losers of Suez, were not waving but drowning. For the ostensible winner, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Suez enabled him to fire up the region with pan-Arab nationalism. But that ideology crashed and burned within scarcely a decade, with Israel’s rout of the Arabs in the 1967 six-day war. The whole thrust of Iraq, by contrast, looks to have given a long-term boost to Islamists of all stripes.

伊战乱局常被拿来与1956年的苏伊士运河危机（即第二次中东战争——译者注）作比较，但苏伊士运河危机并没有产生这么长远的影响。在苏伊士运河危机中，主要失败者是正在没落的殖民大国英国和法国。在那次的欢呼声中，英法不是在挥手相庆，而是溺死了。对于明显的胜利者贾迈勒?阿卜杜勒?纳赛尔(Gamal Abdel Nasser)来说，苏伊士运河危机让他能够在该地区点燃泛阿拉伯民族主义之火。但不到10年后，泛阿拉伯主义就随着1967年以色列在六日战争（即第三次中东战争——译者注）中打败阿拉伯国家而崩溃并消亡了。相比之下，伊拉克战争的主要后果似乎是增强了各派伊斯兰主义分子的长期实力。

This was evident long before the Arab spring upheavals that have made Islamism the new centre of political gravity in the region – and not just because Islamists have won all the elections held in Iraq.

早在“阿拉伯之春”使伊斯兰主义成为该地区新的政治重心之前，这一点就很明显了——这不仅是因为伊斯兰主义者赢得了在伊拉克举行的所有选举。

The 2006 war between Israel and Hizbollah in Lebanon, for example, was a logical follow-on from the Iraq war. Having by then taken fright at the Shia militias and Iranian influence they had unleashed in Iraq, Messrs Bush and Blair egged on the Israelis against the Lebanese Shia paramilitaries. When the fighting ended, a Hizbollah that held its ground had enhanced its prestige and power as a state-within-the-state; and a pro-western government, rare in the region, collapsed in Beirut.

例如，2006年以色列与黎巴嫩真主党之间的战争，堪称伊拉克战争合乎逻辑的后续事件。美英入侵伊拉克释放了什叶派武装力量和伊朗影响力，对此感到惊恐的布什和布莱尔煽动以色列打击黎巴嫩的什叶派准军事组织。战争结束后，坚守住阵地的真主党作为国中之国的声望和实力大涨，而贝鲁特的亲西方政府（这在该地区本来就很罕见）却垮台了。

And what of Iraq itself? The courage and endurance of the Iraqis as they claw their way back, caught between the authoritarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki and the regular bomb outrages of Sunni terrorists, have been extraordinary. But their purported leaders, whether Shia, Sunni or Kurd, tend to pursue factional and sectarian advantage, treating institutions as booty in a zero-sum game that threatens the survival of the country.

伊拉克本身如何呢？在努里?马利基(Nouri al-Maliki)的什叶派威权政府以及逊尼派恐怖分子的频繁炸弹暴行的夹缝中挣扎着恢复元气的伊拉克人，展现出非凡的勇气和毅力。但他们所谓的领导人——无论是什叶派、逊尼派还是库尔德人——倾向于捞取派系和宗派之利，把国家机构当成零和游戏中的战利品。这种零和游戏威胁到伊拉克的存亡。

Iraq was a country, and a deeply traumatised society, when it was invaded, and that turned it into a dark geopolitical metaphor for the region. When other Arabs employ the metaphor, it is not because they feel the region was positively reshaped by force of western arms.

伊拉克遭受入侵之时，是一个国家，也是一个深受重创的社会，而战争把它变成了中东地区一个阴暗的地缘政治隐喻。当其他阿拉伯国家使用这个隐喻时，并不是因为它们认为中东地区得到了西方武装力量的积极重塑。

Iraq – the metaphor and the reality – was about the end of a national narrative, for a people whose lives and politics have been twisted by dictatorship and sectarian strife, and whose leaders appear unable to reconcile. It is about a mosaic society that dissolved into a Balkans-in-the-sands, with minorities ground between the stones of the Sunni and the Shia, and Christians who predate them driven from the land of Abraham.

不管是在隐喻中还是现实中，对于生活和政治都被独裁专制和宗派冲突扭曲、而领导人似乎无意和解的伊拉克人民而言，伊拉克都体现了一个国家故事的终结：一个多元化社会分裂成了沙漠中的巴尔干，少数群体被夹在逊尼派与什叶派中间，而先于他们在这里安家的基督教徒被逐出故土。

Many sense Iraq is also a harbinger. The Maliki government’s manifest refusal to include the Sunni minority and work with the self-governing Kurds calls into question Iraq’s future as a unitary state – just as the Syrian civil war and its cross-border ripples are testing frontiers drawn arbitrarily by France and the UK after the fall of the Ottomans.

很多人的感觉是，伊拉克还预示着未来。马利基政府公然拒绝包容逊尼少数派，还拒绝与自治的库尔德人合作，令人质疑伊拉克作为一个统一国家的未来，正如叙利亚内战及其跨境冲击波正考验着奥斯曼帝国覆灭后英法武断划下的国境线一样。

Those boundaries were little more than lines in the sand, cynically drawn by sinking colonialists. Was Iraq – the reality, not the metaphor – so very different?

这些国界不过是没落的殖民国家装腔作势地在沙漠中划出的线条。现实中（而非隐喻中）的伊拉克有什么不同吗？