http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State
Quote:
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A state is a political association with effective sovereignty over a geographic area. These may be nation states, sub-national states or multinational states. A state usually includes the set of institutions that claim the authority to make the rules that govern the exercise of coercive violence for the people of the society in that territory, though its status as a state often depends in part on being recognized by a number of other states as having internal and external sovereignty over it. In sociology, the state is normally identified with these institutions: in Max Weber's influential definition, it is that organization that "(successfully) claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory," which may include the armed forces, civil service or state bureaucracy, courts, and police.
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Iran, Iraq, Israel...etc have only one state government and thus the state government is the enitre government. Otherwise there would be two governments claiming control over one area.
America is a system of state governments which create their own laws under guidelines of a federal government which acts to unify the state governments and that's why we are called the united states.
So there is the
state of Iran, the
state of Israel and the
states of America.
See, we have more than one and they don't.