"No, no! Not the war, but this war!"

Unlike “the present King of France,” whom Bertrand Russell once argued was not a logically proper subject straightforwardly (and thus meaninglessly) denoting a nonexistent entity but a disguised description, “the war in Iraq” would seem to refer to, well, the war in Iraq. Thus, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently said that the war in Iraq is lost, we might reasonably assume (1) that we understood what he meant and (2) that it was either a very bold or a very stupid thing to say. Or both. Given the reaction so far, the consensus seems to be leaning toward stupid, enough at least to prompt his Senate colleague, Chuck Schumer to engage in a bit of philosophical analysis, himself; to wit:

What Harry Reid is saying is that this war is lost -- in other words, a war where we mainly spend our time policing a civil war between Shiites and Sunnis. We are not going to solve that problem. . . . The war is not lost. And Harry Reid believes this -- we Democrats believe it. . . . So the bottom line is if the war continues on this path, if we continue to try to police and settle a civil war that's been going on for hundreds of years in Iraq, we can't win. But on the other hand, if we change the mission and have that mission focus on the more narrow goal of counterterrorism, we sure can win.

So, too, as David Broder also recalls that other great political metaphysician, Bill Clinton, famously wondering whether existence is a predicate as he grappled with the definition of “is,” we should be comforted by the highly nuanced appreciation of the vagaries of language our elected officials are capable of explicating at the drop of an overnight opinion poll, let alone a subpoena.

Of course, the war in Iraq isn’t the sort of ‘thing’ that has tidy and discrete definitional or physical boundaries, so perhaps we can forgive Schumer this sort of semantic back peddling. Whether the war in Iraq is lost or not does, after all, depend on how one defines the phrase “war in Iraq,” not to mention “lost,” doesn’t it? And I, for one, would be happy to learn exactly how we “sure can win” that “more narrow goal of counterterrorism."

Care to give us the details, Senator Schumer?