軍事:伊戰暴露美國實力侷限

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，喬治·W·布什(George W. Bush)和託尼?布萊爾(Tony Blair)以虛假說詞爲依據，貿然發起了可打可不打的伊拉克戰爭，目的是推翻薩達姆?侯賽因(Saddam Hussein)，而且按照他們的說法，還要重塑中東。10年後的今天，伊拉克依然引發激烈爭論。入侵併佔領伊拉克釋放了具有長期後果的力量。鑑於整件事極其愚蠢，我們只能假設，目前局面並非英美設計者的初衷。

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).

伊拉克這個國家早已在連年戰爭、制裁和暴政的摧殘下元氣盡失，10年前燃起的戰火與其說帶來多麼嚴重的震懾，不如說無情地向世人展現了美國實力的侷限（跑龍套的英國只是配角）。

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.

美國軍事力量之強，獨一無二，這一點誰也無法忽視。但在伊戰之後，似乎無論是在美國國內還是在全世界，人們都真切地懷疑，美國有沒有能力恰當地運用這種實力來影響棘手的事件（目前各方爲要不要武裝敘利亞反政府武裝傷腦筋就是一例）。當未來的歷史學家標註冷戰後短暫的單極世界終結日期時，他們無疑會瞄準伊拉克戰爭。

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.

“意願聯盟”(coalition of the willing)入侵伊拉克，還顛覆了世界上最易燃地區的力量平衡。此舉產生的結果中，最不重要的結果就是最終推翻了早已遭到嚴重削弱的薩達姆政權，此前該政權對西方在以色列和海灣地區的盟友構成威脅。

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.

入侵產生的更大影響是，伊斯蘭中的少數派什葉派（在伊拉克人口中佔多數）自1171年法蒂瑪王朝覆滅以來，首次在阿拉伯心臟地帶的一個國家攫取了權力。除了導致伊拉克發生宗派殺戮外，這還重燃了持續千年的遜尼派與什葉派之間的衝突——從黎凡特到海灣地區，甚至波及印度次大陸。

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.

儘管攻打伊拉克被吹噓爲在“反恐戰爭”中發起致命一擊，但結果卻使奧薩馬?本?拉登(Osama Bin Laden)散播的偏執的反西方情緒和救世聖戰主義愈演愈烈，還不可估量地加強了伊朗激進的什葉派神權統治者（他們是這場戰爭的主要受益者）。

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.

無疑，伊拉克戰爭改變了該地區的參數。主要的動態變量包括遜尼派與什葉派之間壓倒一切的衝突，以及以色列與伊朗之間的對峙。現在伊朗已經成爲區域大國，威脅到以色列的霸權。這些衝突都是中東的火藥桶。

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，在敘利亞，受壓迫的人民在突尼斯、埃及和利比亞革命的鼓舞下，正在反抗爲了坐穩江山而不惜大開殺戒的巴沙爾?阿薩德(Bashar al-Assad)的暴政，爭取自由。但敘利亞人以遜尼派爲主。海灣國家的統治者以及阿拉伯半島的遜尼至上主義者正在支持敘利亞的起義者，這在很大程度上是爲了推翻阿薩德政權，因爲阿薩德政權的根基是異端的什葉派分支阿拉維派，該政權與伊朗以及黎巴嫩的什葉派真主黨(Hizbollah)運動結盟（真主黨是伊朗在黎凡特地區的先鋒）。

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.

伊戰亂局常被拿來與1956年的蘇伊士運河危機（即第二次中東戰爭——譯者注）作比較，但蘇伊士運河危機並沒有產生這麼長遠的影響。在蘇伊士運河危機中，主要失敗者是正在沒落的殖民大國英國和法國。在那次的歡呼聲中，英法不是在揮手相慶，而是溺死了。對於明顯的勝利者賈邁勒?阿卜杜勒?納賽爾(Gamal Abdel Nasser)來說，蘇伊士運河危機讓他能夠在該地區點燃泛阿拉伯民族主義之火。但不到10年後，泛阿拉伯主義就隨着1967年以色列在六日戰爭（即第三次中東戰爭——譯者注）中打敗阿拉伯國家而崩潰並消亡了。相比之下，伊拉克戰爭的主要後果似乎是增強了各派伊斯蘭主義分子的長期實力。

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”使伊斯蘭主義成爲該地區新的政治重心之前，這一點就很明顯了——這不僅是因爲伊斯蘭主義者贏得了在伊拉克舉行的所有選舉。

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年以色列與黎巴嫩真主黨之間的戰爭，堪稱伊拉克戰爭合乎邏輯的後續事件。美英入侵伊拉克釋放了什葉派武裝力量和伊朗影響力，對此感到驚恐的布什和布萊爾煽動以色列打擊黎巴嫩的什葉派準軍事組織。戰爭結束後，堅守住陣地的真主黨作爲國中之國的聲望和實力大漲，而貝魯特的親西方政府（這在該地區本來就很罕見）卻垮臺了。

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？在努裏?馬利基(Nouri al-Maliki)的什葉派威權政府以及遜尼派恐怖分子的頻繁炸彈暴行的夾縫中掙扎着恢復元氣的伊拉克人，展現出非凡的勇氣和毅力。但他們所謂的領導人——無論是什葉派、遜尼派還是庫爾德人——傾向於撈取派系和宗派之利，把國家機構當成零和遊戲中的戰利品。這種零和遊戲威脅到伊拉克的存亡。

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.

伊拉克遭受入侵之時，是一個國家，也是一個深受重創的社會，而戰爭把它變成了中東地區一個陰暗的地緣政治隱喻。當其他阿拉伯國家使用這個隱喻時，並不是因爲它們認爲中東地區得到了西方武裝力量的積極重塑。

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.

不管是在隱喻中還是現實中，對於生活和政治都被獨裁專制和宗派衝突扭曲、而領導人似乎無意和解的伊拉克人民而言，伊拉克都體現了一個國家故事的終結：一個多元化社會分裂成了沙漠中的巴爾幹，少數羣體被夾在遜尼派與什葉派中間，而先於他們在這裏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.

很多人的感覺是，伊拉克還預示着未來。馬利基政府公然拒絕包容遜尼少數派，還拒絕與自治的庫爾德人合作，令人質疑伊拉克作爲一個統一國家的未來，正如敘利亞內戰及其跨境衝擊波正考驗着奧斯曼帝國覆滅後英法武斷劃下的國境線一樣。

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?

這些國界不過是沒落的殖民國家裝腔作勢地在沙漠中劃出的線條。現實中（而非隱喻中）的伊拉克有什麼不同嗎？