Once upon a time, there was a country that preferred to fight its wars while it was asleep. It was a mighty country, capable of projecting its military and economic might around the world at will — but it wasn't a particularly thoughtful country.
To a sleeping country, all wars are sacrosanct and well funded as long as its citizens aren't compelled to sacrifice anything of value — like personal autonomy — to keep it going.
By contrast, the military that serves a sleeping country is always wide awake. After all, it is up to the bureaucracy that runs the war to keep the sounds of breaking things to a manageable level. The military keeps its fingers on the mute button while distributing the sleeping pills a society needs to drool on the pillow of its selective wars of occupation.
As long as there aren't forced conscriptions or daily dispatches confirming the brokenness of the citizen soldier volunteers who fight it and the futility of ever truly winning it, carnage somewhere else can go on indefinitely — sometimes for decades.
All a sleeping country demands in exchange for unlimited expenditure of treasure and other people's blood is to be insulated from the same kind of suffering on the home front experienced by its defenders abroad and the enemy who is never a match for its citizen soldiers on the battlefield.
It will even elect confirmed idiots to govern it while it sleeps as long as that leader agrees to never wake it during wartime with calls of sacrifice or moral accountability.
Because the enemy is always a barbarian of some sort, it is important to keep the wars asymmetric and to the sleeping country's advantage with aerial bombings, missiles, drones and easily rationalized human rights violations.
Under no circumstances is the country's sleep to be interrupted by the discordant sights and sounds of the war's brutal realities. The barbarians who dare to insult the sleeping country can't be allowed to interrupt the country's well-earned sleep as it dreams of the good, rational and morally uplifting war it is fighting abroad.
A sleeping country's dreams always confirm it is only interested in fighting the wars earlier generations fought and died for when war wasn't such a shadowy, unaccountable thing.
A country that sleeps through its wars is a country that has learned from experience that even so-called good wars are abattoirs of horror when fought fully awake. Good citizens prefer their horror stuffed into entertainment, not served arbitrarily by reality.
To avoid collective PTSD, it is better for a society that prefers sleeping through war to limit the trauma of that war to individual soldiers whose patriotism and sense of economic vulnerability compelled them to enter a living nightmare in the first place. War can never be a shared experience.
A sleeping country prefers to fight its wars on a comfortable, adjustable mattress tucked under a weighted blanket, though it knows its dreams will be interrupted by occasional bouts of insomnia and moral reckoning.
A war fought with eyes wide open results in fitful sleep at best, but a sleeping country knows tossing and turning through the night is for lesser nations. Countries with unlimited military budgets and an incurious citizenry have learned to sleep through its moral qualms like newborn babes. The weight of conscience is left to colicky nations that devote most of their annual spending to the social welfare programs for their people.
Yes, there will be a nightmare or two featuring the torture of civilians or enemy combatants. Missiles will level hospitals, and there will be drone attacks on rural wedding parties that somehow always look suspicious in the noonday sun — but as long as a country can keep a sleeping pill and a full glass of water at its bedside, all will be well!
Recently, after two decades dreaming of endless consumption and copulations, a sleeping country was abruptly shaken awake by a housekeeper who was no longer willing to honor the "do not disturb" sign the snoring country hung on the door a long time ago.
Through sleep-encrusted eyes, the country looked around its once-darkened bedroom and was immediately horrified by what it saw. Light streamed through broken blinds and ripped curtains as sounds of conflicts began slowly echoing through the room unbidden and unrepressed by sleep.
To its horror and embarrassment, the once-sleeping country suddenly realized it was also laying on a bed stinking of urine and vomit compounded by decades of neglect. It was also naked and covered with the bed bugs of moral complacency. The housekeeper did not avert its eyes.
Frantically, the once-sleeping country looked around the room and noticed that there were telltale signs that orgies of unspeakable violence had passed through at one point. Though there was blood on the walls and the distinct smell of excrement and moral compromise in the air, there were no actual bodies on the floor. The once-sleeping country breathed a sigh of relief.
The once-sleeping country threw on its underwear, still soiled from years of wallowing in its own filth. It hurriedly pulled up its pants. The housekeeper turned on the TV. The images of the aftermath of the war flooded the screen on every channel.
As the once-sleeping country searched the bedroom floor for its shirt, its shoes and its wallet, an army of cable news Scheherazades unspooled endless tales of national humiliation.
Policy analysts who had been instrumental in starting the war in the first place brazenly criticized the way the war was ending by insisting that all chaos is manageable if the retreat from an endless war is conducted by someone who is just a little more competent than the current leader. A sleeping country can declare victory even in defeat if it spends a little more time fretting over how to manage the optics and logistics of failure. The irony-deficient Scheherazades agreed.
"What about the translators who endangered their own families by helping our soldiers during the occupation of their country? Where's our loyalty?" the national storytellers shout from broadcast studios thousands of miles removed from a war they stopped reporting on regularly decades ago.
The anchors and war correspondents trade stories about the crushed aspirations of the women and girls left behind as the barbarians swept in. Even though the original reasons for embarking on the war are no longer relevant, some hint they wouldn't mind seeing it continue indefinitely so that the world understands that a sleeping country doesn't "cut and run" like its less exceptional peers.
These storytellers, many of whom came to prominence when the war started, ask how wounded veterans and limbless soldiers who made it out alive are supposed to feel knowing that decades in a country that resisted all previous foreign occupations with a ferocity that earned it the nickname "Graveyard of Empires" wasn't enough to get the job done.
"Why weren't contingency plans in place that would've assured a more orderly wakeup from a war for a country that had spent so many decades sleeping?" they hiss with righteous indignation befitting a chattering class.
"It's a crisis of competence," partisans screech, as though every previous second of the decades leading up to that moment weren't also saturated with brutal evidence of institutional and military incompetence.
Blinking back tears, the once-sleeping country wonders who it can blame for its latest humiliation. "Why did you wake me?" it asks the housekeeper. "I was sleeping the sleep of the just and dreaming of the perfect war. How dare you wake me so abruptly? Now I feel guilty about abandoning our allies."
Gazing in its direction without pity, the housekeeper handed the despondent country a bill. It was north of $2 trillion. It includes a death count of 66,999 soldiers of the foreign military it created and supported and nearly 50,000 civilians killed. Hundreds of billions will have to be spent on its own soldiers as they cycle through veteran services in the coming decades.
Meanwhile, the occupied country's ruling class fled with hundreds of millions, if not billions, skimmed from decades of military and economic aid — but that's what entitled rich people do, so no biggie. Of course, hundreds of billions will have to be spent in the coming decades to resettle 2.5 million refugees who have already fled the war a once-sleeping country slept through.
"Awake, sleepwalker," the housekeeper said with a discernible accent. "No matter how many sleeping pills you managed to gobble down over the last 20 years, the war outside was inescapable. Chaos has a way of seeping through the cracks of every war. It manifests itself even in your sleep."
"Our conscience is clear," the once-sleeping country replied. "We went to war to exact revenge on terrorists and to make the world safe for democracy. We also felt sorry for brutalized women and girls, so we continued the occupation for that country's own good."
The housekeeper laughed. "You should save your delusions for the next war. Now, please pay your debt and get out. It will take 100 years to scrub the stink of your hypocrisy out of the carpet."
