Garth 2 wrote:I'm surprised that the 'occupation' of Siliea had an impact of Pritchart thinking as this event didn't occur till after "Operation Thunderbolt" as Alexander said, "we need the manpower to fight back"
Pritchart could have easily have stopped Arnold Giancola's from manipulate the correspondence by
a - ensuring she personally saw the final version of the correspondence being sent (a procreative of the president)
b - hand picking the representative on Manticore (i.e. a friend of hers not Arnold Giancola's) (and possible calling home this person once she realised (though not checking first was just stupid)).
c - ensuring that organisation responsible for the safety of Arnold Giancola's (Secretary for State) was not the same as the one who to ensure the Secretary for State was loyal (which I would have though would have been better placed with Kevin Usher's FIA, to ensure that 'divided loyalties' didn't occur).
d - Removing Arnold Giancola's from office once it became clear he was breaking his oath to the Republic (and weathered the political storm, though I understand her reasons for not doing so)
d part 1 - Keeping a closer eye on him, especially with regards to his deals with the Andies (especially when they came out and said "we agree (our intelligence agency confirms that) HAVEN manipulated the diplomatic correspondence, also they stated that they had no active military forces in Silia (had no plans to resume the offensive) and hey look they did) (though the cold blood split of Silia between the SKM and the Andies is mentioned on Haven, the Andies agreement to enter the war is oddly missing).
e - the other part I have never got, is how can Haven claim sovereignty over annexed star systems. Surely (legally if nothing else) they are independent star systems under Havenite Occupation (even if its been decades). If she truly believed that they should have self determination, surely she should have order the withdrawal of all Haven military assets and left the star systems to get on with it?
Your point about Silesia is well taken. I wrote the book the next best thing to ten years ago and I was writing from memory and failed to check the chronology. My points about the Talbott Quadrant and the occupied star systems remain.
In response to your other points.
a. She did see the final version. What part of the scenes in Nouveau Paris from War of Honor and At All Costs did you miss? It was left to Giancola to transmit that final, authorized version, and he altered it after she had seen and approved the final draft. What? You expect the Secretary of state to "cc" the President electronically on the actual document transmitted when she's already seen, discussed, and authorized every single word of it?
b. I'm not certain what you mean about calling him home "once she realized." Realized what? She was seeing all the correspondence, incoming and outgoing, and there was nothing in it to suggest that Giancola and his buddy were doing anything other than exactly what she and her cabinet had agreed they ought to be doing. Grosclaude wasn't on Manticore all alone; he was the head of an entire diplomatic mission, many of whose staff members were far from Giancola partisans. Nothing any of them were reporting contradicted what she was seeing of the correspondence. They had no more reason than she did to suspect that what she was seeing had been altered by Giancola after it left Manticore (where they'd probably had a hand in writing it in the first place) and before she saw it, so they had no reason to "correct the record." For that matter, given High Ridge and Delacroix's approach to diplomacy, there wasn't much --- aside from the exact wording of the various diplomatic cables --- that would have needed correction.
c. Again, I don't understand what you mean. She should have altered the government to put Usher in charge of Giancola's internal security? As the head of the FIA, he was responsible for detecting and defeating foreign efforts to compromise the State Department's security, and one is generally fairly safe in assuming that the Secretary of State himself is not a spy and not a traitor. The State Department has its own internal security specialists, just as the US Department of State does, who are fully familiar with the security needs and requirements of their own agency, which the FIA isn't. Nesbitt, Giancola's co-conspirator, was in a position to assist Giancola because he was a part of that security force. Until there was some evidence that security had, in fact, been breached (which there was not, until Usher grew suspicious enough to launch a completely "black" investigation), there was no conceivable reason for Pritchart to alter the existing security arrangements and organs.
d. At what point prior to Usher's black investigation did it become "clear he was breaking his oath of office"? There was no evidence of any such thing until after hostilities had resumed. If you mean after it became clear to her and Usher that he was the one who'd altered the diplomatic correspondence, she was in no position to prove her suspicions at that time --- which was precisely why she commissioned Usher to continue his investigation in search of that proof. She went through all of the political and legal reasons she couldn't just go ahead and fire him at that point in the book, and I see no reason to recap them now. I will add only that the Secretary of State and the Department of State had become irrelevant to the conduct of the war until such time as she managed to reopen negotiations with Manticore, which meant he was in no position to do additional damage, especially now that she knew to keep an eye on him and not trust him as far as she could spit upwind in a hurricane. Far better to keep him exactly where he was, unaware of the investigation hopefully closing in on him, rather than alert him that he was in trouble and possibly provoke the political and constitutional crises she was afraid of by moving before she had proof. She had no reason to expect him to be killed in an air-car accident before the investigation was completed, and I think it's clear that when the investigation was completed, she had every intention of going public and letting the chips fall where they might.
I have no idea at all what you're saying in "d part 1," I'm afraid.
e. Okay, she did withdraw all Havenite military forces from every single inhabited system which said it wanted to leave the Republic. All of those "Haven-occupied" star systems had legally become member systems of the PRH. They were legally incorporated into it, they had local governments which were part of the PRH, etc. Now, there might have been a "system government in exile" somewhere, or there might have been intense local opposition to becoming and remaining a part of the PRH, but the institutions, the political system, and the laws were all in place to make them integral parts of the PRH.
I never said Pritchart favored a complete dissolution of the Republic and some sort of return to the status quo pre-1864. Had that been the decision of all of the member systems, she would have accepted it, but I never indicated that that was what she wanted or what she thought would be the ideal solution or outcome. However it came into existence, the interstellar RoH existed as the second largest start nation in the galaxy. Not everyone wanted to leave it, however they'd joined it, and she had extended the protections of the Havenite Constitution to all of its new citizens. There were deep, existing economic, political, and social bonds holding the Republish together, whether or not everyone was happy about how they'd come to exist, and she was prepared to allow every single star system in it to decide whether it wanted to maintain those bonds (under the restored constitution) or dissolve them. Now, in the period when Theisman was fighting his wars against the SS warlords, she wasn't about to start holding plebiscites, if for no other reason than that withdrawing her forces from any one of those star systems would only have painted a big, bright target on it for the warlords. As soon as the fighting was over however, the plebiscites were held . . . and they were organized while the fighting was still ongoing.
If you expected her to do more than that, then I think your expectations were not only unrealistic but unreasonable.
