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| WASHINGTON — A month before President George W. Bush first sent American troops into Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was warned that the war might end up costing the United States billions of dollars. | 华盛顿——布什总统首次向伊拉克派兵的一个月前，时任国防部长拉姆斯菲尔德收到警告，这场战争可能会消耗国库数十亿美元。 |
| Mr. Rumsfeld’s reply to retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, the American tasked with overseeing Iraq’s postwar reconstruction, would constitute a towering moment of hubris in a foreign policy misadventure tragically replete with them. | 这场外交政策灾难中充斥着傲慢的瞬间，而拉姆斯菲尔德对负责伊拉克战后重建的退役中将杰伊·加纳的答复是其中的极致。 |
| “My friend,” General Garner remembered Mr. Rumsfeld saying, “if you think we’re going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken.” | “我的朋友，”加纳记得拉姆斯菲尔德说，“如果你认为我们会掏出10亿美元花在那里，那你就大错特错了。 |
| Today, 20 years after the president ordered the airstrikes that rained down on Baghdad on the night of March 20, 2003, the war is widely seen in Washington’s power centers as a lesson in failed policymaking, one deeply absorbed if not thoroughly learned. | 2003年3月20日晚，布什总统下令对巴格达发动空袭；20年后的今天，这场战争在华盛顿的权力中心被普遍视为失败的决策，是个得到深刻吸取的教训，尽管其中还有不明之处。 |
| The United States spent an estimated $2 trillion in Iraq over the two decades, a price tag that barely begins to express the toll it has taken on both countries. Roughly 8,500 American military personnel and contractors lost their lives there, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project, and as many as 300,000 others returned home suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders. Iraq lost nearly half a million civilians in the war and the subsequent eight-year American occupation, which Mr. Rumsfeld vowed would never occur. | 据估计，在过去20年中，美国在伊拉克花费了大约2万亿美元，但这个价签并不足以概括这场战争给两国造成的所有损失。根据布朗大学的战争成本研究项目，大约有8500名美国军人和合同工在那里丧生，还有多达30万人回国后出现创伤后应激障碍。在这场战争以及随后八年的美国占领中，近50万伊拉克平民丧生。拉姆斯菲尔德曾发誓，绝不会发生这种情况。 |
| Fallout from the failures has shaped a generation of politicians and policymakers. The war deeply damaged the reputation of the intelligence agencies and heightened skepticism of military leaders. It empowered politicians willing to harness that skepticism — from Nancy Pelosi, who was first elected speaker of the House in a surge of antiwar sentiment in 2007, to Donald J. Trump, who in 2015 denounced the war as “a tremendous disservice to humanity” and slammed its Republican architects. | 失败的后果影响了一代政治人和政策制定者。这场战争严重损害了情报机构的声誉，并加剧了对军方领导人的怀疑。它帮助了那些愿意利用这种怀疑态度的政治人物——从2007年在反战情绪高涨中首次当选众议院议长的佩洛西到特朗普，后者在2015年谴责这场战争是“对人类的巨大伤害”，并抨击了这场战争的共和党策划者。 |
| But the greatest legacy of the Iraq war is a desire to never do it again, there or anywhere. Two decades later, there is a growing aversion to intervening overseas, among not only Democrats but also Republicans. | 但伊拉克战争的最大遗产是人们希望无论在哪里都永远不要再重蹈覆辙。20年后的今天，不仅是民主党人，就连共和党人也越来越反感海外干预。 |
| “Last year, we had a vote on humanitarian aid to Ukraine,” said Fred Upton, a Republican from Michigan who retired two months ago after serving 36 years in the House. “Now, we’ve always had an element of isolationism in my party. But on this vote: 57 Republicans saying no to humanitarian aid? Oh, my goodness.” | “去年，我们就向乌克兰提供人道主义援助进行了投票，”来自密歇根州的共和党人弗雷德·厄普顿说，他在众议院任职36年后于两个月前退休。“我们党内如今一直有孤立主义存在。但在这次投票中：有57名共和党人对人道主义援助说不？我的天啊。” |
| The isolationism is now the position of the two leading choices for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has not yet announced a campaign but said in a statement last week that “while the U.S. has many vital national interests,” a “territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them.” | 孤立主义现在是共和党总统候选人提名的两位热门人选——特朗普和佛罗里达州州长罗恩·德桑蒂斯的立场。德桑蒂斯尚未宣布参选，但他在上周的一份声明中表示，“虽然美国有许多至关重要的国家利益，”但“乌克兰和俄罗斯的领土争端不在其中”。 |
| In his 2016 campaign for president, Mr. Trump could and did point to the highly experienced Bush war team — including Mr. Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser — and credibly question what good all that expertise brought the United States. | 在特朗普2016年的总统竞选中，他能够而且确实抨击了布什手下那个经验丰富的战争团队——包括拉姆斯菲尔德、副总统迪克·切尼、国务卿科林·鲍威尔和国家安全顾问康多莉扎·赖斯——对这些人的专长给美国带来了什么好处提出了合理的质疑。 |
| “I think distrust and rejection of Washington culture after Iraq opened the opportunity for outsiders to make their case,” said retired Lt. Gen. Gregory S. Newbold. “And if nothing else, Trump was the quintessential outsider. Not only did Trump not have experience, he rejected experience as being irrelevant.” | “我认为，伊拉克之后对华盛顿文化产生的不信任和抗拒给局外人提供了证明自己的机会，”退役中将格雷戈里·S·纽博尔德说。“别的不说，特朗普是典型的局外人。特朗普不仅没有经验，还认为经验无关紧要。” |
| General Newbold, who was the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the run-up to the war, was a rare dissenting voice at the time. He argued to no avail that the Iraq regime had been badly weakened by sanctions and posed no threat to the United States. | 纽博尔德在战争前夕任参谋长联席会议行动主任，他的反对声音在当时很罕见。他认为伊拉克政权已被制裁严重削弱，对美国不构成威胁，但他的争辩无济于事。 |
| Two decades later, General Newbold said, the investment in the war has come at the expense of America’s current military preparedness. “Spending all that money on wartime operations left us with less money to budget for future technologies,” he said. “You look at the Chinese military’s capabilities with hypersonic missiles, and the size of their forces, versus our decline in the number of Navy ships and Air Force squadrons and Army brigades. You can’t help but get a feeling that we aren’t as capable as we were in 2003.” | 20年后，纽博尔德说，对那次战争的投资是以牺牲美国当下备战状态为代价的。“将所有这些钱花在战时行动上使我们用于未来技术预算的资金减少了，”他说。“你看看中国军队的高超音速导弹能力及其部队规模，相比之下，我们的海军舰艇、空军中队和陆军旅数量在下降。你不得不感到我们不如2003年强大了。” |
| Still, for a momentous event that Martin Indyk, an assistant secretary of state and a U.S. ambassador to Israel in the Clinton administration, describes as “a complete disaster on every level,” the Iraq war has prompted little in the way of fulsome discussion among members of Congress who are empowered with deciding whether to authorize the use of military force. | 克林顿政府助理国务卿、美国驻以色列大使马丁·因迪克称伊拉克战争是“在所有层面都是彻底灾难”的重大事件，然而在有能力决定是否授权使用武力的国会议员中，却基本上没有就这件事展开充分讨论。 |
| “I think Iraq was forgotten as soon as we withdrew,” said Peter Meijer, who was deployed there in 2010 as an Army reserve officer and who later served in Congress for a single term. Mr. Meijer said that he seldom engaged in lessons-learned discussions about Iraq with his colleagues, some of whom voted to authorize the war in 2002. “I’ve become skeptical that Congress can function in any way that isn’t reactive,” he said. | “我觉得在我们撤军的时候，伊拉克就被遗忘了，”2010年作为陆军预备役军官部署到伊拉克的彼得·梅耶说，他后来做过一个任期的国会议员。梅耶说，他很少与他的同事就伊拉克问题进行经验教训讨论，其中一些人在2002年投票批准了战争。“我开始怀疑白宫是不是只能以被动的方式运作，”他说。 |
| Perhaps no institution has been as hurt by the Iraq failures as the American intelligence agencies, led by the C.I.A., which provided ammunition to the Bush administration’s case for war that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. | 也许没有哪个机构像由中情局领导的美国情报机构那样因美国在伊拉克失败受损，它当时为布什政府的战争理由提供了证据支持，即萨达姆·侯赛因拥有大规模杀伤性武器。 |
| As weapons inspectors scouring Iraq were already discovering in the months before the invasion, those assessments were based on speculation and outdated intelligence. The authors of the assessments made clear to their superiors at the C.I.A. that their information was far from conclusive, but those distinctions were seldom conveyed to Bush administration officials who had made clear their determination to overthrow Mr. Hussein. | 正如搜查伊拉克的武器视察员在入侵前几个月已经发现的那样，这些评估是基于推测和过时的情报。评估的作者向他们在中情局的上级明确表示，他们的信息远非决定性的，但这些很少传达给布什政府官员，后者明确表示决心推翻侯赛因。 |
| “What I found frustrating after it was discovered that Iraq didn’t have W.M.D. was that the agency blamed all its mistakes on the analysts,” said Jane Green, at the time the chief of the C.I.A.’s Iraq group, which assessed the country’s political, military and economic activities. “It wasn’t the analysts who were pushing to help the administration find grounds for its political decision to go to war.” | “在发现伊拉克没有大规模杀伤性武器后，我感到不满的是，中情局将所有错误都归咎于分析师，”时任中情局伊拉克小组负责人的简·格林说，该小组负责评估了该国的政治、军事和经济活动。“推动帮助政府为开战的政治决定寻找理由的并不是分析师。” |
| After the C.I.A.’s determination in 2004 that Iraq had neither an illicit weapons stockpile nor an active weapons program — facts that many administration officials, including Mr. Bush, took years to accept — the chastened agency moved to adopt more sophisticated measures for situations when hard evidence was in short supply. But, Ms. Green said, “advanced analytic techniques don’t matter when policymakers are determined to strip out the nuance and demand a short, clear, yes-or-no bottom-line judgment.” | 中情局2004年确定伊拉克既没有非法武器储备也没有现行武器计划，包括布什在内的许多政府官员花了数年时间才接受这一事实。此后，有所收敛的中情局开始采取更细致的措施来应对缺乏确凿证据的情况。但是，格林说，“当政策制定者决心不理会那些难以一言蔽之的东西，要求做出简短、清晰、非黑即白的决断时，高级分析技术变得不重要了。” |
| Ms. Green cited two postwar examples of U.S. elected officials continuing to misrepresent equivocal, nuanced intelligence judgments, just as had been the case before the invasion of Iraq. The first, in January 2017, was the assessment that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election with the aim of helping to elect Mr. Trump. | 格林列举了两个战后的例子，其中美国民选官员继续曲解含糊、微妙的情报判断，就像入侵伊拉克之前的情况一样。第一个是2017年1月判断俄罗斯干涉2016年总统大选以求帮助特朗普当选。 |
| The C.I.A. and the F.B.I. had “high confidence” in the assessment, while the National Security Agency had “medium confidence,” a lower level. Offended by the insinuation that his victory over Hillary Clinton was somehow not legitimate, Mr. Trump falsely maintained that the intelligence community had concluded that Russian interference had zero impact on the electoral outcome. | 中情局和联邦调查局做出“高置信度”评估，而国家安全局则给出低一档的“中置信度”。特朗普感到被冒犯，这等于在暗示他在某种程度上不是名正言顺打败希拉里·克林顿的，他妄称情报界已经得出结论，俄罗斯的干预对选举结果完全没有影响。 |
| A more recent example of how post-Iraq intelligence reforms have proved ineffectual, Ms. Green said, is the Energy Department’s assessment last month that the coronavirus originated from an accidental laboratory leak in Wuhan, China, rather than from that city’s outdoor market. Intelligence officials at the department stipulated that this was a “low confidence” assessment — with which the C.I.A. and nearly every other intelligence agency did not concur — but those caveats did not stop a number of Republicans from calling it proof of malice on the Chinese government’s part. | 格林表示，伊拉克战争后的情报改革被证明无效，最近的一个例子是，能源部上个月的评估认为新冠病毒源于中国武汉实验室的一次意外泄漏，而不是来自该市的户外市场。该部情报官员判定，这是一个“低置信度”评估——中央情报局和几乎所有其他情报机构都不同意该评估——但这些警告并没有阻止一些共和党人称这是中国政府图谋不轨的证据。 |
| “It’s easy to see how even sophisticated intelligence assessments, such as the one on the origins of Covid, can be turned into political footballs,” Ms. Green said, “especially when confidence levels are low and intelligence agencies disagree with each other.” | “很容易看出，即使是复杂的情报评估，比如关于新冠病毒起源的评估，也可能变成政治橄榄球，”格林说，“尤其是在置信度很低、情报机构彼此意见不一的情况下。” |
| Perhaps the most poignant measure of the toll the war has taken on America can be seen in military service. After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. military recruitment spiked to a level not seen since the attack on Pearl Harbor, coinciding with the sense of national unity that pervaded the country. | 战争对美国造成的最深刻的影响或许可以从兵役情况中看到。2001年9月11日发生恐怖袭击后，美国征兵人数飙升至珍珠港事件以来的最高水平，与全国上下弥漫的同仇敌忾情绪相一致。 |
| Ultimately, 1.5 million Americans would serve in Iraq. The casualties and disillusionment of that wartime experience have been followed by steady declines in recruitment. Last year’s numbers fell 25 percent below the Army’s goal. | 最终，有150万美国人在伊拉克服役。伴随着伤亡和战时的幻灭感，征兵人数持续下降。去年的数字比陆军的目标低了25%。 |
| Among those who had heeded the call was a wayward Alaska resident, Mark Jalone, who was ambling through Anchorage one day in late 2001 when he heard an Army advertisement on the radio and impulsively drove to a recruiting office. Mr. Jalone became a staff sergeant and served three tours in Iraq, until severe injuries in July 2006 from a roadside bomb brought his combat duties to an end. | 随性的阿拉斯加人马克·贾龙就是在当时响应征兵号召的。2001年底的一天，在安克雷奇街头晃悠的他听到收音机播出的陆军广告，于是一时冲动驱车去了一个征兵办公室。贾龙后来成为一名上士，三次派驻伊拉克，直到2006年7月被路边炸弹炸成重伤，从此不再执行作战任务。 |
| What followed, Mr. Jalone recalled recently, “was a roller coaster, to be honest. After coming home, the burn marks and scars slowly faded, but what didn’t were the PTSD and the traumatic brain injury.” | 前不久，贾龙回忆说，后来发生的事情“说实话，就像过山车一样。回家后，烧伤痕迹和伤疤慢慢消失了，但创伤后应激障碍和创伤性脑损伤却没有消失。” |
| He began taking as many as 18 medications at a time. The erosion of his short-term memory, Mr. Jalone said, led to outbursts of frustrated anger. His marriage broke up. He spoke a language of alienation and pain that only fellow veterans in his Facebook chat group understood. A close friend he had served with in Iraq committed suicide. Mr. Jalone acknowledged having such thoughts himself. | 他开始服用药物，最多时同时要服用18种。贾龙说，他的短期记忆出现衰退，导致他爆发出沮丧的怒火。他的婚姻破裂了。他说的是一种异化和痛苦的语言，只有那些Facebook聊天群里的老兵才能理解。他在伊拉克服役期间的一位密友自杀了。贾龙承认自己也有这样的想法。 |
| Recently, however, Mr. Jalone — now 46, retired from the military and living off disability payments — said he had begun to turn a corner. | 但最近，现年46岁、已经退伍并靠伤残津贴生活的贾龙说，他已经开始好转。 |
| “I started to understand through intensive therapy, from writing down my feelings and separating them from facts, what was triggering my PTSD,” he said. “It was that I’d been holding against myself the fact that the I.E.D. went off, and I and my team members got hurt. I’d been the one in charge. I’d convinced myself that it was my fault.” | “通过强化治疗，通过写下我的感受并将它们与事实区分开来，我开始明白，究竟是什么引发了我的创伤后应激障碍，”他说。“我一直在耿耿于怀，因为IED爆炸了，我和我的团队成员受伤了。我是负责人。我让自己相信这一切都是我的错。” |
| Of course, the facts said otherwise. | 当然，事实并非如此。 |
| Mr. Jalone realized, he said, that he was among the last to blame for what happened that day in Iraq. | 贾龙说，他意识到，那天在伊拉克发生的事情，他是最不应该受到责备的人之一。 |
| General Garner, who ran Iraq’s postwar construction from March to May 2003 as civil order broke down and violence escalated, recalled Mr. Rumsfeld’s early plans in an interview last week, just after returning from a trip to see old friends in the Kurdish-dominated northern part of Iraq. “His thinking was that we would liberate Iraq and then just walk away,” he said of Mr. Rumsfeld, who died in 2021. | 加纳将军在2003年3月至5月期间负责伊拉克战后建设，当时伊拉克国内秩序崩溃，暴力局势在恶化。他在上周接受采访时回忆了拉姆斯菲尔德的早期计划，当时他刚从库尔德人占主导地位的伊拉克北部拜访老友归来。“他的想法是，我们解放伊拉克，然后一走了之，”他提到于2021年去世的拉姆斯菲尔德时说。 |
| General Garner’s own assessment of the country that Mr. Bush was bent on liberating from Mr. Hussein is, with the benefit of hindsight, brutal. | 事后看来，对于这个布什决心从侯赛因手中解放出来的国家，加纳本人的评估是一针见血的。 |
| “We overthrew Saddam and handed the country over to Iran,” he said, lamenting how Iraq’s neighbor now exerts its influence. “The whole thing’s been a disaster. You had to be blind not to at least suspect that this would happen.” | “我们推翻了萨达姆，把国家交给了伊朗，”他说，并为伊拉克的邻国现在如何对其施加影响力而感到惋惜。“整件事就是一场灾难。你至少应该想到这可能会发生，除非是瞎了眼。” |
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