[转帖] [2012.03.31] Falklands war: Short, victorious war 福克兰战爭30周年祭

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http://www.ecocn.org/thread-65944-1-1.html Thirty years after the Falklands war 福克兰群岛之战30周年祭 Short, victorious war 短暂的战争，胜利的战争 On April 2nd 1982 Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. The war Britain fought to recover them still colours domestic politics 1982年4月2日，阿根廷军队入侵福克兰群岛 [注1]。英国收复该群岛的战争至今仍影响着国内政治 Mar 31st 2012 | from the print edition 051 Britain - Thirty years after the Falklands campaign.mp3 (2.46 MB, 下载次数: 59) WHEN Adrian Mole, a fictional teenage diarist of the early 1980s, tells his father that the Falkland Islands have been invaded, Mr Mole shoots out of bed. He “thought the Falklands lay off the coast of Scotland”. That Britain still had sovereignty over a clutch of islands in the South Atlantic did, indeed, seem odd. Sending a naval task force 8,000 miles to fight for a thinly inhabited imperial relic seemed odder still. In some ways the conflict has come to seem even stranger since 1982. Yet for all its eccentricity, the Falklands campaign still shapes the politics of Britain. 上世纪80年代初，虚构的日记主人公，少年安德里安•摩尔（Adrian Mole）告诉他父亲，福克兰群岛遭到入侵，老摩尔当即从床上一跃而起。他“还以为福克兰群岛在苏格兰沿海呢。”英国仍在南大西洋上拥有一群岛屿的主权，这看上去的确古怪。派遣一支海军特遣队奔袭8000英里（1英里约为1.6公里，译者注），为一处没多少居民的日不落帝国遗物而战，这件事看上去还更为古怪。自1982年以来，从某些方面来说，这一冲突似乎变得更加古怪了。尽管有这么多奇异之处，福克兰群岛战争仍然对英国政治有极大影响。 Among historians, the main debates about the war’s legacy concern Mrs Thatcher and her Conservative government. Could she have survived as prime minister had the Falklands not been retaken? (In her memoirs, she says not.) Would the Tories have won the 1983 election had Argentina never invaded? (Probably.) But the conflict also changed attitudes to foreign policy and war itself. 史学家对这次战争遗留问题的主要争论与撒切尔夫人和她的保守党政府有关。如果英国未能夺回群岛，撒切尔能否保住她的首相职位？（她在自己的回忆录中说不能。）如果阿根廷从未入侵，保守党能否赢得1983年的大选？（或许可以。）但这次冲突也改变了人们对外交政策和战争本身的态度。 The dash across the Atlantic and subsequent victory—almost as much of a surprise to many Britons as they were to the Argentines—seemed to mark an end to Britain’s apparently inevitable international decline, a retreat epitomized by the Suez debacle of 1956. After the 1970s, a decade in which, Europe aside, British leaders had mostly been preoccupied with domestic woes—recession; industrial unrest; an IMF bail-out—the Falklands made foreign affairs, and Britain’s clout in the world, measures of successful leadership. That has remained the case ever since. 横跨大西洋的远征以及随之而来的胜利不但让阿根廷人吃惊，也几乎同样让许多英国人吃惊。以1956年苏伊士运河败退 [注] 为缩影，英国的国际地位看上去每况愈下；这次胜利似乎标志着这一状况的结束。不算欧洲，上世纪70年代是英国领袖主要考虑国内灾难的十年，其中包括经济衰退、工人罢工、国际货币基金组织的拯救行动等。此后的福克兰群岛战争使外交事务以及英国的国际势力变成了衡量英国领导人是否成功的标准。这一点直到今天依然如此。 And if Britain took more notice of the world after the Falklands, the reverse was true, too. “Everywhere I went after the war,” Lady Thatcher (as she later became) wrote in her memoirs, “Britain’s name meant something more than it had.” Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB officer stationed in London in 1982 who subsequently defected, remembers that the KGB confidently expected Britain to lose. 如果说英国从福克兰群岛战争后更多地关注世界事务，这次战争也使世界更多地关注英国。后来受封为女勋爵的撒切尔在她的回忆录里写道：“在那次战争之后，无论我走到哪里，英国的名声都比过去更管用了。”一位1982年被派驻伦敦但后来投诚的克格勃官员奥列格•高蒂夫斯基（Oleg Gordievsky） 还记得，克格勃曾非常有信心地等着看英国的笑话。 Glory days 光荣的日子 As Hew Strachan of Oxford University puts it, America’s experience in Vietnam had made war seem messy and unpredictable. Lady Thatcher’s victory suggested that war could achieve political ends quickly and efficiently. Where a knee-jerk antimilitarism had once prevailed, Britain’s armed forces came to seem noble and professional: the “best in the world”, as British politicians’ constant refrain has it. 正如牛津大学的修•斯特拉臣（Hew Strachan）所述，美国在越南的经历让人觉得战争肮脏而且无法预测。撒切尔夫人的胜利告诉人们：战争可以迅速、有效地完成政治目的。英国曾经是一个自然而然地普遍反战的国家，但这一次它的武装力量看上去崇高而又称职，似乎就像英国政治家们不断重复的赞美那样，是“世界上最优秀的。” In 1982 the campaign looked like a strategic blip. The main job, during the cold war, was to defend Europe from the Soviet Union. In retrospect, observes Mr Strachan, it was the first in a series of short, sharp, expeditionary wars that Britain was to fight: later came the first Gulf war, Kosovo and the intervention in Sierra Leone. Consciously or otherwise, the triumph in the South Atlantic may have affected Britain’s appetite for those engagements. 这次战争在1982年看上去像一次临时的战略转变，因为冷战时期西方的主要任务是保卫欧洲不受苏联侵略。斯特拉臣认为：现在回头看，那是英国参加的一系列短暂、激烈的远征战事的第一次，后来有第一次海湾战争、科索沃战争和对塞拉利昂（Sierra Leone）的干预。无论英国是否有所意识，南大西洋的胜利可能让它参与这些战争的胃口大开。 That run ended in Afghanistan and Iraq—missions that have involved elusive opponents, changing rationales and disappointingly uncertain outcomes. Little wonder that the Falklands war—which was fought against a state, for a simple cause and to a swift and absolute victory—still inspires pride and nostalgia in Britain. 这种状况在阿富汗和伊拉克结束。那里的作战牵涉到难以捉摸的对手、不断变化的战场基本状况和极其未定的结局。因此，对抗一个国家、有明确的目标、迅速取得了压倒性胜利的福克兰群岛战争到今天还鼓舞着英国的自豪感和怀念心情，这也就不足为奇了。 Perhaps its most tangible impact has been on defence spending. Because of the war, the navy was protected from cuts for much longer than it would otherwise have been. Today the government estimates the cost of its commitment to the islands, including its garrison and air and sea links to Britain, as ￡200m ($318m) a year. 或许这场战争最让人感觉得到的影响是对防务费用的冲击。如果没有它，缩减海军预算的进程会提前许多。政府估计它今天在福克兰群岛投入的年费用为2亿英镑（3.18亿美元），其中包括驻守当地的卫戌部队和维持英国本土与它的空中与海上联系的花销。 The navy now finds itself temporarily without an aircraft-carrier, which has led to febrile speculation that, if lost, the islands could not be retaken. That is scaremongering, for two reasons. First, as Sir Lawrence Freedman, the war’s official historian, summarises, Britain would indeed struggle to recover the islands if they were overrun again—but defending them in the first place would be much easier, because of the men and kit now deployed there. 海军在一段时间内将没有航空母舰服役，这让有些人头脑发热地猜测：一旦失守，英国将无力夺回福克兰群岛。出于两个原因，这种说法纯属危言耸听。首先，如该次战争的官方史学家劳伦斯•弗里德曼（Lawrence Freedman）勋爵所总结的那样，如果福克兰群岛再次被占领，收复它们的确不易；但若专注于保卫群岛则会容易许多，因为部队与装备已经部署在那里了。 Second, Argentina does not want to repeat the war, which triggered the end of military dictatorship and the advent of democracy. Subsequent governments have, however, retained their country’s claim to what Argentines call “Las Malvinas”. Cristina Fernández, Argentina’s president, has forsworn force as a tactic; yet as the 30th anniversary of the invasion approaches, she has energetically pressed the case by other means (in a bid, some argue, to distract voters’ attention from high inflation and other economic woes). 其次，阿根廷并不想再次发动战争。上次战争导致军事独裁政权的垮台与民主政治的到来，但此后的各届政府都继续声称阿根廷对他们所说的“马尔维纳斯群岛”拥有主权。阿根廷总统克里斯蒂娜•费尔南德斯（Cristina Fernández）曾发誓放弃考虑武力；而在入侵30周年即将到来之际，她积极地以其他手段在此问题上施压。有人认为，此举是为了转移选民对高通胀与其他经济灾难的关注。 Recent steps by her administration have been designed to impede tourism—along with fishing, a mainstay of the islands’ economy—and even Argentina’s overall trade with Britain. In that context, the friendly inducements she occasionally dangles before the 3,000 islanders don’t wash. “Everything they’ve done makes us deeply suspicious of everything they’ve offered us,” says Dick Sawle, a member of the Falklands’ legislative assembly. Ms Fernández has striven to enlist other governments in the region to her niggly campaign—likely to intensify if oil is produced in the islands’ waters. Rockhopper, an energy firm, found oil offshore in 2010, and says it expects to start production in 2016. 她的政府最近设计采取的步骤是妨碍该群岛的旅游业和渔业，后者是群岛的经济支柱。他们甚至不惜损害阿根廷与英国的整体贸易。在这种情况下，她偶尔友好地对3000岛民伸出的诱惑橄榄枝没有说服力。“福克兰群岛立法议会”成员迪克•索尔（Dick Sawle）说：“他们的所作所为让我们对他们向我们提出的一切建议都深感怀疑。”费尔南德斯努力争取让该地区其他国家政府参与她的找茬攻势；这一攻势在该群岛海域出产石油后可能会进一步加强。2010年，一家能源公司，洛克霍普公司（Rockhopper）在该岛近海发现了石油；据该公司称，正式开采预计将于2016年开始。 For its part, the British government says it is absolutely committed to the islanders’ right of self-determination. They overwhelmingly wish to stay British, a desire that is the basis of the British claim to sovereignty. Compromise would anyway be impossible while the war is a living memory: polls suggest that public opinion in mainland Britain is firmly against any concession. Jeremy Browne, the Foreign Office minister responsible for Falklands policy, doubts that, say, Brazil or Uruguay has much interest in a regional economic blockade of the islands. He thinks Argentina would be overreaching if it tried to organise one. That may prove optimistic, especially if an oil bonanza stimulates wider Latin American resource nationalism. 英国政府方面声称，它完全尊重群岛岛民的自决权。占压倒多数的岛民希望继续保持英国公民身份，这一意愿是英国声称拥有该群岛主权的基础。在人们对战争记忆犹新的时刻，妥协无论如何也是不可能的：民调显示，英国本土公众舆论坚决反对任何让步。负责福克兰群岛政策的外交国务大臣杰里米•布朗（Jeremy Browne, the Foreign Office minister）不觉得诸如巴西或乌拉圭一类国家会对地区性封锁该群岛经济有多大兴趣。他认为，阿根廷组织这样封锁的结果只有因不自量力而失败。这话可能过于乐观，特别当庞大的石油贮藏刺激了更广泛的拉丁美洲资源民族主义的时候。 Mr Browne observes that tension over the Falklands has not followed a straight path: it is worse now than it was 15 years ago. The same may be true of the war’s emotional impact. Britain’s current leaders, who are mostly in their 40s, reached political consciousness in the early 1980s; the Tory half of the coalition, at least, reveres Lady Thatcher. Their views on the Falklands are noticeably firm. The war’s impact on Argentina was much more dramatic. But, quietly and enduringly, it left its mark on Britain, too. 布劳恩注意到，福克兰群岛的局势紧张并非单向发展：现在的局势比15年前更为紧张。战争造成的情感冲击可能也是如此。当今英国的领袖们大多40多岁，他们在上世纪80年代初开始有政治意识；至少联合政府中的保守党成员尊敬撒切尔夫人。他们在福克兰群岛问题上的观点显然十分坚定。这次战争对阿根廷的冲击更加戏剧性得多，但它也静悄悄地在英国留下了持久的影响。 [注] 1956年的苏伊士败退：1956年埃及政府宣布将苏伊士运河收归国有，造成英法两国与以色列不满。三国出兵进攻埃及，但在国际社会包括美国与苏联的强大压力之下被迫退兵。该危机直接导致英国艾登政府下台。

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