I'm not going to bore anyone by going into political theories on polities and notions of the leviathan, but there are interesting dimensions to the war on terror that I haven't seen addressed in a while.
The concept of the modern democratic state is simple. The people of the nation elect a government to represent them - to put it in metaphysical terms the government is the 1, 100 or 1000-man personification of millions of citizens. Their every action is the will of the people.
Knowing that's the case do civilians exist in such countries? Every member of a democratic society holds the franchise to vote. They accept that occasionally their governments will do something which they personally disagree with but that the majority agree with.
With that as the basis, can we say without hypocrisy that any civilian is innocent? They are party to the social contract of their state. They are, in quasi-legal terms, fully responsible for everything their government does.
So how can a strike against a democracy's civilians be considered terrorism? Every one of those citizens is an agent of the state, albeit a fairly minor and personally irrelevent one. They are no less responsible for, say, the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers or the mistreatment of Guantanamo Bay inhabitants than their governments are. They could have spoken up and overthrown their system of government.
So the question remains, can these alleged civilians be considered innocent casualties?
Naturally the humanitarian perspective is yes, they can. Whether through ignorance and stupidity they were unable to affect the shape of their government (or they actively oppose their government) there are going to be some in every civilian population who aren't guilty. Therefore where possible the deaths of those who don't actively support a war should be avoided or minimised.
But when we really get down to it ignorance or opposition is no excuse. Those citizen-criminals could have abandoned their citizenship. They could have left the country. They could even have committed suicide or assassinated key figures in the government they oppose in an attempt to right injustices.
But they didn't, and in these thoroughly modern times most understand that the civilian must die for their government's crimes, particularly when targets that fire back are hard to find. It's only just.