Dueling Bouzoukis,

With all due respect, your profound insight about war has been obscured by a grammatical confusion of some importance.

There is no reason you cannot declare war against a noun -- Germany, Japan, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics are all nouns. The Taliban is a noun.

But to declare a war that can never be won, try declaring war on a condition such as drugs, badness, irritability, fanaticism, terrorism, left-handedness, or liberalism. No go. Conditions have no center. They have no concrete thing to define when a war begins or ends. Grammatically, these words are all nouns (or noun-like) but they cannot be the object of a meaningful declaration of hostilities.

The reason, of course, is that the set is completely unbounded and could range from 1 to an infinite number of persons, animals, objects, etc. which subscribe to the condition. Attributes and conditions do not fight. Only a flatulent idiot would try to declare war on one!!

A