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【原文标题】Death of a Failure 【中文标题】一个失败的宣告死亡 【登载媒体】纽约时报 【来源地址】http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-wagner/message-to-pakistan_b_863518.html
【译 者】1095824899 【翻译方式】 人工
【声 明】 本翻译供Anti-CNN使用，未经AC或译者许可，不得转载。
【译 文】
For months after 9/11, people watched planes. They watched skyscrapers. They looked over their shoulders in crowded places — at baseball games, college graduations, New Year’s celebrations. They eyed bearded men on planes and trains, glanced nervously at suspicious packages in shopping malls, and listened for the lilt of Arabic in airports and bus stations. They profiled relentlessly and shamelessly, and waited for the next attack to come.
911之后几个月,人们看了飞机。也看了摩天大楼。他们习惯了在拥挤的地方抬头——棒球比赛上,大学毕业典礼上,新年的庆祝活动上。他们密切注视在飞机、火车长着长胡子的人,紧张地瞥眼可着在购物中心的包裹,在机场和公交车站里听带着阿拉伯语的口音。他们恐惧的地,等待下一个攻击来。
I moved to Washington, D.C., a year after the twin towers fell, and there was a touch of London during the blitz in the way that people carried themselves in those days.
My friends and neighbors rode the Metro with stiff upper lips, kept calm and carried on as they headed to work at the Pentagon or the State Department (or a minor think tank or political magazine, for that matter), and generally behaved as if even the most everyday activities were taking place in the valley of the shadow of death. We felt as if we were living with targets on our backs. We assumed that it was only a matter of time until Al Qaeda struck again
在双塔倒下的一年后，我搬到华盛顿特区,,在那些日子里，恐惧似乎还带着一种行动的方式在伦敦进行。
我的朋友和邻居们乘坐地铁时也僵硬着上唇,努力保持冷静并前往他们在五角大楼或国务院(或一个次要的智囊团或政治杂志,因为这件事)的工作,通常表现得好像连最日常活动都发生在死亡阴影笼罩的山谷里。我们觉得仿佛我们是生活在我们后面的目标。我们认为“基地”组织又再次降临只是时间问题。
Ten years later, we’re still waiting. There have been many plots, certainly, foiled by good intelligence work or good police work or simple grace and luck.
There have been shoe bombers and there have been underwear bombers and Times Square bombers — and others still, presumably, that were cut short before they reached the headlines.
But the wave of further violence that seemed inevitable in those fraught months after 9/11 never materialized within our borders. And what seemed like the horrifying opening offensive in a new and terrifying war stands instead as an isolated case — a passing moment when Al Qaeda seemed to rival fascism and Communism as a potential threat to our civilization, and when Osama bin Laden inspired far more fear and trembling than his actual capabilities deserved.
10年后,我们仍然在等待。当然,已有许多情节被良好的情报工作或良好的警务工作或简单的恩典和运气挫败了。 已经有鞋轰炸机和有内衣轰炸机和时代广场的轰炸机,而其他的大概是,在还没来得及登上头条新闻的时候就被剪切掉了。
但那些似乎不可避免那些暗藏在911事件之后的暴力风波,几个月来却从未出现的我们的境内。看起来像是恐怖的开放进攻以一种新的并且可怕的战争而不是一个孤立的案例作为一个路过的时刻,“基地”组织的竞争对手法西斯主义和共产主义似乎是一个潜在的威胁到我们的文明,而奥萨马•本•拉登激发了更多的恐惧远远多于他应得的报应。 Now the man is dead.
This is a triumph for the United States of America, for our soldiers and intelligence operatives, and for the president as well. But it is not quite the triumph that it would have seemed if bin Laden had been captured a decade ago, because those 10 years have taught us that we didn’t need to fear him and his rabble as much as we did, temporarily but intensely, in the weeks when ground zero still smoked.
They’ve taught us, instead, that whatever blunders we make (and we have made many), however many advantages we squander (and there has been much squandering), and whatever quagmires we find ourselves lured into, our civilization is not fundamentally threatened by the utopian fantasy politics embodied by groups like Al Qaeda, or the mix of thugs, fools and pseudointellectuals who rally around their banner.
现在这个男人死了。
这是美利坚合众国的胜利,也是我们的士兵和情报特工,以及总统的胜利。但它不完全是一个胜利,似乎本·拉丹十年前就该被捕了，因为那10年告诉我们,我们不需要害怕他和他的乌合之众,暂时但是强烈的,在接下来的几个星期当“归零地”仍然炮火熏天
他们已经教会我们的,而不是无论我们犯了什么错误(而且我们犯了许多),然而我们浪费了很多优势(并且已经有很多优势正在被浪费着),无论我们是否发现自己深陷泥潭而停滞不前,我们的文明没有从根本上被那些以基地组织为代表的乌托邦的幻想政治组织威胁,或者是被那些汇集起来的恶棍、傻瓜和那些自以为学识渊博的家伙所威胁。
They can strike us, they can wound us, they can kill us. They can goad us into tactical errors and strategic blunders. But they are not, and never will be, an existential threat.
This was not clear immediately after 9/11. On that day, they took us by surprise. They took advantage of our society’s great strength — its openness and freedom, the welcome it gives to immigrants and the presumption of innocence it extends. And in the wake of their attack, we did not know what they were capable of, or how they might follow up their victory.
Now we know. We know because bin Laden is finally dead and gone, but in a sense we knew already.
We learned the lesson in every day that passed without an attack, in every year that turned, and in the way our eyes turned, gradually but permanently, from the skies and the sky-scrapers back to the ordinary things of life.
他们能袭击我们,他们可以伤害我们,他们可以杀死我们。他们也可以刺激我们进入战术错误和战略上的失误。但是它们不是,也永远不可能会是我们存在的致命威胁。
911事件之后,这些没有被马上意识到。在那一天,他们出乎我们意外。他们利用我们的社会的巨大的力量——开放和自由,欢迎它给移民和无罪延伸的推定。攻击之后,我们不知道它们的能力,也不知道他们的胜利之后会是什么。
但是现在我们知道了。我们知道这一点,因为本拉登终于死了,消失了,以一种我们早就预料过的结果。 我们学到了教训，在没有攻击之后的每一天,每一年，当我们转过身来,渐渐地而不是永远的,我们从天空和天空的轰炸机回到平凡的生活中。
We learned when the planes landed safely, when the malls stayed open, when the commencements came and went, when one baseball season gave way to another.
Day after day, hour after hour, we learned that we were strong and they were weak.
One of bin Laden’s most famous quotations (there were not many in his oeuvre) compared the United States and Al Qaeda to racing horses. “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse,” he told his acolytes over table talk, “by nature, they will like the strong horse.”
In his cracked vision, America was the weak nag, and Al Qaeda the strong destrier.
But the last 10 years have taught us differently: In life as well as death, Osama bin Laden was always the weak horse.
当飞机安全降落,当所有的购物商场开始营业时,当毕业典礼开始了又结束时,当一个棒球赛季让位给了另一个赛季时，我们都学到了很多。
一天又一天,一小时接着一小时,我们得知我们是强大的,他们却很虚弱。
本·拉登的一个最著名的项目(他的作品中没有很多),就是“基地”组织和美国的赛马比赛。在谈话中他告诉他的助手，“当人们看到一匹骁勇善战的马和一匹虚弱的马,从本质上讲,他们会喜欢这个强大的马。” 当他被粉碎,美国这个虚弱的老马,和“基地”组织的强烈的强壮的马的对比。 但是过去的十年以一种不同寻常的方式教训了我们:在生活中，即使是死亡,奥萨马·本·拉登死亡始终是那匹软弱的马。
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