Assassinating the leaders of terrorist organizations ‐ i.e., non-state actors, such as Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi ‐ did not lead to a greater war footing against the USA because, as terrorist organization leaders, not heads of state, they are automatically considered rogue, even by sovereign state leaders sympathetic to their goals. Al-Qaeda and ISIS, despite any claims to territorial governance, are non-state actors. Thus, despite ISIS's former control of land areas, ISIS was despised for its aggressions but was not considered a serious threat to the power of leaders of other Muslim-dominant states within the region. The Middle Eastern Muslim states that may, to a certain degree, be sympathetic to ISIS's dreams of a re-established caliphate such as existed for hundreds of years nevertheless did not intend to defer to the leader of ISIS as that caliph. Despite Islam's socio-political backwardness in today's world, the glories of Islam's earlier history loom large in the consciousness of most Islamics. ISIS did not appear to Islamics as the proper heir of that presumed glorious history.
Iran's listing as a state sponsor of terrorism by the U.S. State Department puts it into a special category. Iran is a behind-the-scenes puppeteer of Hamas operating in Gaza, Hezb'allah operating in Lebanon, and the Houthis operating in Yemen as well as a variety of groups in Iraq. Not only did Iran held 52 Americans hostage for over a year after the ayatollahs overthrew the Shah in the 1970s, but the Iranians were crucial in the bombing of the U.S. military barracks in Lebanon (1983), the bombing of the Khobar Towers and American troops in Saudi Arabia (1996), the bombing of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (1998), the bombing of the USS Cole (2000), and the attack on the World Trade Center (2001). With this nefarious history, acting through proxies to undermine the security of the West and the U.S. in particular, Iran's designation as a terrorist state ‐ living in the gray area between sovereign legitimacy and terrorist aggression ‐ is warranted and necessary.