The word “terrorist” has a long and storied history and its use is highly contested to say the least.  Its origins date back to the Terror in France and originally applied to state actors, but since it was applied to Russian anarchists in the last 19^th century, it has been used to refer to exclusively to non-state actors who illegally use violence or the threat of violence to further certain political ends.  That said, as the old saying goes one person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist; in other words, the rightness of a particular cause has been used as a reason not to apply the term to particular groups.         

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Building on definitions, such as the FBIs, Chomsky and others have applied the term to both state actors and non-state actors.  Their efforts to change the meaning of the term have met with limited success and only serve to further confuse people.  While it is common enough to see various US and Israeli actions described in some quarters as meeting this or that definition, Iraq’s Anfal campaign, for example, is never so described.  Moreover, while Stalin, Saddam and Hitler did bang up job of terrorizing huge numbers of people, it just seems plain odd to say they are the most prominent terrorists of the 20th century. 

Jim Elve from blogs Canada “The U.S.'s pre-emptive war against Iraq was in clear violation of the UN Charter, to which they are a signatory. Article 2(4) and Article 51 prohibit one nation from attacking another except in self-defense or with the authority of the U.N. Last week, Kofi Annan stated that the invasion was illegal - in FBI parlance: ‘the unlawful use of force’.”

Legally speaking the so called second Gulf War was just a continuation of the last war and so was legal.  What was signed in 1991 was a cease fire agreement and what was at issue all along was whether two permanent members of the Security Council had the power to decide whether the cease fire was broken and so continue hostilities.  France, Russia and China said no.  The US and Britain said yes.  The problem for the former was that the latter had years of precedent to cite.  The US and Britain had since the implementation of the no fly zones, which were derived from a US and British interpretation of 688, frequently decided when Iraq was in violation of a sub section of the seize fire agreement.