What makes a terrorist a terrorist?

Would that include George Bush and Tony Blair? They were, after all, touting the idea of regime change, and their use of unmanned cruise missiles in Iraq was probably just as terrifying to the Iraqi people as were Hitler's buzz bombs of WWII to the British.

Quite right. And that's why a "war on terrorism" makes no sense.The big puzzle to me has always been Tony Blair's role in this. Can somebody from that side of the pond explain it. I understand Bush's involvement, but Blair is intelligent enough to know better.

So do I take it that when the U.S. was supporting and funding the contras in Nicaragua, the U.S. was an international terrorist state.

For the most part, terrorists are desparate people with serious grievances.The current way of dealing with terrorists only increases grievances and raises the degree of desperation. It creates more agrieved people, and causes more people to become desparate. The current US foreign policy is the best recruiting tool for terrorism that there has ever been. It's a them against us mentality.When those that we consider our peers have grievances against us, we address those grievances and come to some sort of negotiated settlement. When those that we consider inferior have grievances against us, we initially ignore them. And if they then act on their own to address the grievances, we declare them terrorists and set about killing them off.It's good old fashioned racism and bigotry. As a "Christian" nation, our policies display the "righteous" hatred, "righteous" bigotry, "righteous" racism that comes from fundamentalism. If we were truly Christian, we would be finding better ways of dealing with agrieved people.