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| There is a question about the American-led invasion of Iraq that, 20 years later, remains a matter of deep uncertainty and debate among historians, political scientists and even officials who helped set the war in motion. | 在20年后的今天，一个关于美国领导的入侵伊拉克的问题仍然充满了不确定性，令历史、政治学者以及甚至参与发动那场战争的官员争论不休。 |
| It’s not the war’s toll in American military deaths (about 4,600) or Iraqi lives (estimates generally fall around 300,000 or more killed directly by fighting). Nor the financial cost to the United States ($815 billion, not counting indirect costs like lost productivity). | 问题不在于那场战争中美军的死亡人数（约4600人）或伊拉克人的死亡人数（一般估计直接死于战争的人数约为30万或更多）。也不是关于美国打这场战争的经济成本（8150亿美元，不包括生产力损失等间接成本）。 |
| It’s not even the war’s consequences, which are broadly understood to include, at a minimum, plunging Iraq into civil war, giving rise to a new generation of jihadism and, for a time, chastening American interventionism. | 甚至不是这场战争的后果——人们普遍认为，这场战争的后果至少包括令伊拉克陷入内战、催生了新一代圣战运动，并在一段时间内令美国的干预主义有所收敛。 |
| Rather, it’s question that would seem to be far simpler: Why did the United States invade at all? | 实际上它是一个简单得多的问题：美国到底为什么要入侵伊拉克？ |
| Was it really, as the George W. Bush administration claimed in the war’s run-up, to neutralize an active Iraqi arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that turned out to not exist? | 难道真的像布什政府在战争准备阶段所宣称的那样，是为了清除伊拉克的大规模杀伤性武器吗（后来事实证明这些武器并不存在）？ |
| Was it over, as the administration heavily implied, suspicions that Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s leader, had been involved in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which also proved false? | 是出于对伊拉克领导人萨达姆·侯赛因参与“9·11”恐怖袭击事件——正如政府强烈暗示的那样——的怀疑吗（后来也被证明是错的）？ |
| Was it to liberate Iraqis from Mr. Hussein’s rule and bring democracy to the Middle East, as the administration would later claim? | 还是像美国政府后来声称的那样，是为了将伊拉克人从萨达姆的统治下解放出来，给中东带去民主？ |
| Oil? Faulty intelligence? Geopolitical gain? Simple overconfidence? Popular desire for a war, any war, to reclaim national pride? Or, as in conflicts like World War I, mutual miscommunication that sent distrustful states bumbling into conflict? | 是为了石油？因为错误的情报所致？为了地缘政治利益？纯粹过度自信？民众渴望一场战争，任何战争，以重新获得民族自豪感？又或者，像类似第一次世界大战那样的冲突，相互间的误解使得互不信任的国家陷入冲突？ |
| “I will go to my grave not knowing that. I can’t answer it,” Richard Haass, a senior State Department official at the time of the invasion, said in 2004 when asked why it had happened. | “我至死都无法回答这个问题，”美国入侵伊拉克时担任国务院高级官员的理查德·哈斯在2004年被问及为什么会这样时表示。 |
| It’s not that there’s some still-missing puzzle piece or state secret. Quite the opposite: As time has passed, journalistic investigations and insider testimonies have explored nearly every facet of the invasion. | 这并不是说还有什么不清楚的地方或国家机密。恰恰相反。随着时间的推移，新闻调查和内部人士的证词已经把入侵的几乎方方面面都给探究了一遍。 |
| Still, the last 20 years have brought us closer to, if not a simple answer, then a set of overlapping theories. And that inquiry has often taken place with an eye on the future as much as the past. | 过去的20年让我们更接近一套相互重叠的理论，如果谈不上一个简单的答案的话。相关调查往往既着眼于过去，也着眼于未来。 |
| “If you want to prevent this from happening again,” said Elizabeth Saunders, a Georgetown University scholar, “you need to get the diagnosis right.” | “你若想防止这种情况再次发生，”乔治敦大学的学者伊丽莎白·桑德斯说，“你需要做出正确的诊断。” |
| Searching for Motive | 查明动机 |
| One question has drawn particular scrutiny: Did the administration sincerely believe its rationale for war, or engineer it as a pretense? | 有一个问题引起了特别的关注：布什政府是真心相信自己发动战争的理由，还是拿它来当借口？ |
| Insider accounts consistently portray the administration as playing down or rejecting mountains of intelligence contradicting its claims, instead cherry-picking circumstantial evidence for its case. | 内幕消息一直称政府故意淡化或拒绝与其主张矛盾的大量情报，却刻意挑选有利于自己的间接证据。 |
| That began in the hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, with Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, pressing subordinates for proof of his suspicion that Mr. Hussein had been involved. Four days later, at a Camp David meeting, Mr. Wolfowitz and others argued that Mr. Hussein was probably responsible, urging Mr. Bush to consider military action. | 这始于“9·11”袭击发生几个小时后，时任国防部副部长的保罗·沃尔福威茨要求下属提供证据证明他的怀疑，即这次恐怖袭击和萨达姆有关。四天后，在戴维营的一次会议上，沃尔福威茨等人认为萨达姆可能要对此负责，并敦促布什考虑采取军事行动。 |
| “I believe Iraq was involved,” Mr. Bush told his national security team two days later, adding that he did not yet have the evidence to act, according to interviews conducted by the journalist Bob Woodward. | 据记者鲍勃·伍德沃德的采访，两天后，布什对他的国家安全团队表示，“我相信伊拉克参与了此事。”他还说，手里尚无可以采取行动的证据。 |
| Soon after, officials began making this case publicly. | 不久之后，官员们开始公开此事。 |
| Tellingly, when evidence proved elusive, the administration did not slow its drive, but rather changed its rationale. Officials claimed that Mr. Hussein possessed, or would soon possess, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that he might intend to use against the United States. Those claims were carried, and amplified, by America’s major media outlets. | 引人注目的是，当发现证据不可靠时，政府并没有放慢脚步，而是改变了理由。官员们声称，侯赛因拥有或即将拥有他可能打算用来对付美国的核武器、化学武器和生物武器。美国主要媒体传播并放大了这些说法。 |
| We now know officials often misrepresented what they had. But meeting notes and other accounts do not show them as plotting to sell a weapons threat that they knew was fictitious, nor as having been misled by faulty intelligence. | 我们现在知道官员们经常对他们掌握的东西进行歪曲的呈现。但会议记录和其他记录表明，他们并没有在密谋推动明知是虚构的武器威胁，也没有被错误的情报误导。 |
| Rather, the record suggests something more banal: A critical mass of senior officials all came to the table wanting to topple Mr. Hussein for their own reasons, and then talked one another into believing the most readily available justification. | 相反，记录表明的情况更为平庸：大量高级官员都来到谈判桌前，出于他们自己的原因想要推翻侯赛因，然后说服彼此相信最现成的理由。 |
| “The truth,” Mr. Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair in 2003, “is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason.” | “事实是，”沃尔福威茨在2003年对《名利场》杂志说，“出于与美国政府官僚主义有很大关系的原因，我们选择大规模杀伤性武器问题作为核心原因，这是一个每个人都能达成共识的问题。” |
| Searching for a Cause | 寻找理由 |
| Yet this does not explain why those officials all suddenly converged on toppling Mr. Hussein. | 然而，这并不能解释为什么这些官员会突然齐心协力想要推翻侯赛因。 |
| One school of thought focuses on the impersonal forces of international relations, which may have sent the two countries careening toward a war that served neither’s interests. | 一个思想流派关注国际关系中的非个人力量，这些力量可能将两国推向了一场不符合双方利益的战争。 |
| One such reading cites the cold logic of game theory, with distrustful adversaries locked in escalating threats and bluffs that began in the conflicts of the 1990s. | 其中一种解读引用了博弈论的冰冷逻辑，即相互不信任的对手陷入了1990年代冲突中开始的不断升级的威胁和虚张声势的局面。 |
| Mr. Hussein, in this view, overstated his willingness to fight and concealed the paltry state of his weapons programs to appear strong at home and deter the Americans, who had attacked in 1998. But Washington believed him. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush’s threats were perhaps misread in Baghdad as a bluff. Several rounds later, they were at war. | 在这种观点看来，侯赛因夸大了他的战争意愿，并隐瞒了其武器计划无足轻重的状态，以在国内显得强大并阻止美国人，美国曾于1998年对该国发动袭击。但华盛顿信了他。与此同时，巴格达可能误读了布什的威胁，以为那是虚张声势。几个回合后，他们开战了。 |
| Still, miscommunication cannot explain the final run-up, when Baghdad allowed weapons inspectors total access and Washington established the sincerity of its invasion threats. | 然而，沟通不畅无法解释战争前夕的最后准备阶段，当时巴格达准许武器视察员全面进入，而华盛顿明确了其入侵威胁是认真的。 |
| Others suggest that after Sept. 11, “the United States felt the need to regain status and establish itself as an aggressive global power,” the scholar Ahsan Butt has written. This was rooted in a calculation that America’s greatest source of strength was global perceptions of the country as unchallengeable. | 另一些人则认为，在“9·11”之后，“美国感到有必要重整旗鼓，确立自己为一个强势的全球大国，”学者阿桑·巴特写道。这种看法基于的考虑是，美国最大的力量来源于被全球视为不可挑战的国家。 |
| “If there was a hidden reason, the one I heard most was that we needed to change the geopolitical momentum after Sept. 11,” Mr. Haass has said of internal deliberations. “People wanted to show that we can dish it out as well as take it. We’re not a pitiful helpless giant.” | “要说隐藏的原因，我听到最多的就是我们需要在9·11之后改变地缘政治势头，”哈斯谈到内部审议时说。“人们想证明，我们不但能够承受而且可以进攻。我们不是可怜无助的巨人。” |
| Scholars now largely doubt another, once-prevalent theory: that Washington invaded to control Iraq’s vast oil resources. One book-length study concluded that while Iraq’s oil heightened its importance to Washington, the invasion was “not a classic resource war, in the sense that the United States did not seize oil reserves for profit and control.” | 学者们现在在很大程度上怀疑另一个曾经流行的理论：华盛顿入侵伊拉克是为了控制伊拉克丰富的石油资源。一项已成书出版的研究得出结论，虽然伊拉克的石油提高了它对华盛顿的重要性，但那场入侵“不是典型的资源战争，因为美国没有为了利润和控制而夺取石油储备。” |
| Searching for a Reason | 寻找动机 |
| There is growing focus on the second school of thought for why American policymakers moved to war. | 关于美国决策者为何转向战争的另一派说法越来越受到关注。 |
| “Scholars of the Iraq War should shift their attention from the thoroughly examined 18 months between 9/11 and the March 2003 invasion to the pivotal decade of the 1990s, when Iraq became a major political and foreign policy issue in the United States,” Joseph Stieb, a U.S. Naval War College historian, wrote for the website War on the Rocks. | “研究伊拉克战争的学者应该将注意力从9月11日至2003年3月入侵之间经过充分审视的那18个月移开，转到1990年代这关键十年，当时伊拉克成为美国的主要政治和外交政策问题，”美国海军战争学院历史学家约瑟夫·斯蒂布为网站War on the Rocks撰稿写道。 |
| It is in the 1990s, Dr. Stieb argued, where historians would find “the intellectual, political and cultural scaffolding of the beliefs that motivated the 2003 Iraq War.” | 斯蒂布认为，历史学家们可以在1990年代找到“驱动2003年伊拉克战争的那些观念背后的知识、政治和文化框架”。 |
| After the Cold War’s end, a small circle of policymakers and academics calling themselves neoconservatives argued that the United States, rather than drawing down, should wield its now mostly unchallenged power to enforce an era of “global benevolent hegemony.” | 冷战结束后，一小群自称新保守主义者的政策制定者和学者认为，美国不应收缩，而应利用它当时几乎无人挑战的实力来建立一个“全球仁慈霸权”的时代。 |
| The United States’ military dominance, rooted in American ideals, would smash the last vestiges of despotism from the world, allowing democracy and peace to flourish. Any resistance, they warned, however small or remote, was a threat to the entire American-led order. | 根植于美国理想的美国军事主导地位将粉碎世界上最后的专制主义残余，让民主与和平蓬勃发展。这些人警告说，任何抵抗——无论多么微小或遥远——都是对整个美国领导的秩序的威胁。 |
| After years as intellectual insurgents within the Republican Party, the neoconservatives were suddenly elevated to an influential policy board in 1998. Newt Gingrich, who was then speaker of the House, had turned to them after the party’s 1996 election losses, believing that new ideas would attract voters. | 多年来，新保守主义者在共和党内部一直扮演智识反叛者的角色，在1998年，他们的地位突然得到提升，成立了一个有影响力的政策委员会。时任众议院议长纽特·金里奇在1996年共和党大选失利后求助于他们，认为新思想会吸引选民。 |
| Members included Mr. Wolfowitz as well as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, who would become Mr. Bush’s vice president, defense secretary and secretary of state. | 除了沃尔福威茨，委员会中还有迪克·切尼、唐纳德·拉姆斯菲尔德和康多莉扎·赖斯，也就是日后布什政府的副总统、国防部长和国务卿。 |
| Neoconservatives also formed Project for the New American Century, a think tank, to act as the voice for the movement, which now spoke for the Republican Party. As one of its first acts, the group issued an open letter to the Clinton administration warning, “We may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War.” | 新保守主义者还成立了智库“新美国世纪计划”，为这场运动发声，如今它已经是共和党的喉舌。该组织最初的行动包括发表一封致克林顿政府公开信，警告称：“我们可能很快就会在中东面临自冷战结束以来我们所知的最严重威胁。” |
| It urged President Bill Clinton to “aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.” | 它敦促克林顿总统“以推翻萨达姆·侯赛因政权为首要目标”。 |
| Small and relatively poor, Iraq would seem an unusual choice as a new national rival, but neoconservatives’ view required an adversary to explain why the world had not yet rallied behind American leadership. In the late 1990s, a time of nearly unrivaled American dominance, there were simply few candidates. | 由于伊拉克国土面积小而且相对贫穷，选择该国作为新的国家竞争对手似乎不太寻常，但新保守主义者的观点需要找出一个对手，以便解释为何全世界尚未团结起来支持美国的领导。1990年代末，在美国几乎无人能敌的主导地位之下，可选择的对手寥寥无几。 |
| Iraq also appealed for another reason. Mr. Hussein had ejected international weapons inspectors, which was seen in Washington as a humiliating policy failure for Mr. Clinton. | 选择伊拉克还有另一个原因。萨达姆驱逐了国际武器核查人员，在华盛顿看来，这是克林顿在政策上的一次耻辱性失败。 |
| When the American leader was weakened by scandal later that year, congressional Republicans pounced, passing the Iraq Liberation Act, which declared toppling Mr. Hussein an official U.S. policy. Mr. Clinton signed the bill, and although he resisted its call for removing Mr. Hussein, he later used it as legal justification for airstrikes on Iraq. | 在克林顿因丑闻受到削弱时，国会共和党人在当年晚些时候趁机出手，通过了《伊拉克解放法案》，宣布推翻侯赛因是美国的正式政策。克林顿签署了这项法案，尽管他拒绝了该法案关于推翻萨达姆的要求，但后来他把该法案作为对伊拉克发动空袭的法律依据。 |
| Few scholars argue that Mr. Bush’s team came into office plotting to invade Iraq and then seized on Sept. 11 as an excuse. Rather, one growing view is that in the shock of the attack, many officials, grasping for an explanation, saw confirmation of the neoconservative view that seemed to provide one. | 几乎没有哪位学者认为，小布什的团队在上台时就已策划入侵伊拉克，然后把9·11事件作为行动借口。越来越多的观点认为，在袭击事件的冲击之下，许多官员急于寻找解释，他们看到新保守主义观点似乎能够提供解释，并且得到了证实。 |
| Mr. Hussein was the heart of the Middle East’s political and social rot, they said, and only purifying American power could solve the region’s ills. | 他们说，萨达姆是中东政治和社会腐败的核心，只有美国的净化力量才能解决该地区的弊病。 |
| Still, the competing theories tend to share a common baseline: that a mix of ideological convictions, psychological biases, process breakdowns and misaligned diplomatic signals led to an invasion that did little to serve the goals that its architects believed they were advancing. | 尽管如此，这些相互竞争的理论往往有一个共同的基础认识：意识形态执念、心理偏见、程序上的失误和不统一的外交信号混合在一起，导致了这样一场入侵，它对其设计者心目中正在推进的目标几乎没有任何帮助。 |
| And that may not be so unusual. A year into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, analysts are still trying to peer into the mind of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to understand why he did it so that they might craft a way to turn him back. | 这种事可能并不罕见。俄罗斯入侵乌克兰已经一年了，分析人士仍在试图揣测俄罗斯总统普京的想法，去理解他为什么要这么做，以便想出办法让他回心转意。 |
| No matter how much we know about the facts of the 2003 invasion, Dr. Saunders said, “some of it will remain fundamentally unknowable.” | 桑德斯说，无论我们对2003年入侵伊拉克的事实了解多少，“有些事情从根本上依然是不可知的。” |
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