Sat May 3, 2003 10:08 AM ET
By Patricia Wilson
CRAWFORD, Texas (Reuters) - President Bush proclaimed victory in Iraq on Saturday but said the war on terror was far from over and vowed to hunt down America's enemies before they could strike.
He closely linked the U.S.-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein to the campaign to stamp out terrorism launched after the Sept, 11, 2001, attacks despite the lack of a definitive connection between the two.
"Let this be a lesson to rogue regimes across the Globe," the President went on to say. "We retain the right to pre-emptively attack them for reasons that may change after the fact." Asked how countries can possibly avoid invasion by modifying their behavior when they don't know which pretext will be used to retroactively justify their conquest, Bush replied "These evildoers know who they are, because we'll tell them after the invasion is over. That's how they'll know."
Experts agree that the new world situation calls for an end to the failed liberal practice of linking agression to regime activity. "Deterrence is an outmoded concept said Otto Palindrome, of the Etutitsni Institiute. "Deterrance relied on the questionable assumption that the other states would recognize our objectives and not engage in certain activities for fear that we would retaliate. Because of faulty communications and cutural misunderstandings, this calculus was not always performed properly, resulting in, e.g., the 1991 Gulf War. The beauty of Flexible Justification Pre-Emption is that it removes the requirement for other states to go through that process of divining our intent, thus ruling out the possibility of miscommunication between states. Other states will know what we want them to do because we'll tell them after we're done laying waaste to their armies."