Annachie wrote:Scuffles wrote:
I fail to see how glassing Sphinx can possibly lead to the league breaking up faster. Care to elaborate?
Also, there's an enormous difference between sneak attacking a legitimate military installation and destroying an entire planet. Sure, there was large amounts of collateral damage, but to suggest that there's not a huge step between the two is crazy.
Second part first. No, there's little difference really. Past a certain point an atrocity is an atrocity.
After all, what is the fundamental difference in cutting up a huge space station manned by military and civilians, knowing that large parts will go crashing down the gravity well, and tossing a couple of rocks at a planet populated by military and civilians? Nothing but a modicum of perceived respectability and a touch of PR. Assuming you care about respectability in the first place.
I think we can safely say that the MAlign don't care about respectability.
As for speeding the break up, what do you think will happen in the Solarian League senate? In the Solly media? Remembering that the MAlign have more than enough mouth pieces to push any and all sides to the story.
Firstly, there will be a segment that is all "EE violation we must identifying who did it and punish them"
The second major segment, no doubt pushed by the Mandarins "Well, hey they did declare war on us after all that misinformation and bad diplomacy. Sod 'em. They probably did it to themselves anyway"
Third segment will be all "Maybe we [Solarian League] did it. After all we're fighting an illegal, undeclared, war against them"
Fourth segment. "Maybe Manticore is right about there being some hidden manipulative power causing strife and war"
No doubt there will be more sentiments than that.
Using these feelings the MAlign could damn near start open fighting on the senate floor, let alone between planets. Add to that the ability to have one of the future RF systems come in on Manticore's side with the aim of getting into the GA as a fifth column, and wiping out Sphinx puts a near terminal dent in the Treecat numbers, and by now the Treecats must be worrying Albrecht.
It's unlikely to happen of course, author fiat, and we're not likely to see even the idea presented, but the planning committee has to at least be seriously considering it.
Actually their best bet is to back right off on the military stuff, provide a "Fake MALign headquarters" for the GA to smash, and slip their own Alpha's into the Manticore royal line though marriage to the next in line when that heir is born.
Probably Haven politics too. Probably need two families on opposite sides of the political spectrum to provide tit for tat presidents.
Hang on.
Two family lines.
Opposite sides politically.
Likely swapping the presidency between them.
My god the MAlign are practicing with America!
You can call it “author’s fiat” if you wish, but I don’t understand what the fascination with greater and greater atrocities really is. For some reason, some readers want to posit ever greater monstrosities and then argue that “it only makes sense” for them to happen.
I suppose I could treat it as an indication that people are sufficiently invested in my fictional universe to feel deeply and strongly and to explore all the options. In fact, however, it reminds me of a debate my friend Richard Earnshaw had with people who were so upset with Bernardus Van Dort for feeling horrified by the death inflicted on the terrorists attacked by Aivars Terekhov’s Marines in Shadow of Saganami. I’m not asserting that the cases are identical, but rather that they demonstrate a . . . detachment, perhaps, from the moral, philosophical, and empathic “realities” underlying my literary universe as they tend to underlie the world in which we live, as well.
Are there lunatics who would be so incredibly stupid and so horrendously lacking in both rationality and empathy as to embrace the sort of strategy being recommended here? There probably are. They aren’t the people running the Mesan Alignment, however. The empathy argument might not carry a lot of weight with them, but the rationality one certainly would, as I pointed out in my previous post. You may reject my reasoning, but that’s where that “authorial fiat” comes in. I know what the underlying political factors and public opinion factors are in the Honorverse. I know how long and how thoroughly the Eridani Edict has been internalized by the Solarian League and everyone else living in it. And I know how the polities of the Honorverse will react to an open and intentional Eridani Edict violation.
Annachie wrote:“Second part first. No, there's little difference really. Past a certain point an atrocity is an atrocity.
After all, what is the fundamental difference in cutting up a huge space station manned by military and civilians, knowing that large parts will go crashing down the gravity well, and tossing a couple of rocks at a planet populated by military and civilians? Nothing but a modicum of perceived respectability and a touch of PR. Assuming you care about respectability in the first place.
I think we can safely say that the MAlign don't care about respectability.
There is one hell of a lot of difference between Oyster Bay and a deliberate genocidal attack on an inhabited planet, and it is one which is well recognized under interstellar law and philosophically in the Honorverse. The space station that was destroyed, and whose wreckage impacted the surface of Sphinx, was a legitimate military target because of its industrial, war-supporting capacity. The Eridani Edict has always recognized the “legality” of attacks on space infrastructure. The attacking party is supposed to give sufficient warning and time for civilians to be evacuated, but the Eridani Edict has also always recognized that that may not be militarily possible. The unintended consequences of a legitimate act of war are not the same thing as an intentional atrocity or war crime. While I despise the way in which the term “collateral damage” is used to sanitize the consequences of military operations, it has some validity, and this is a perfect example of it. And lest there be any doubt, while interstellar legal opinion frowns on undeclared wars, they have happened with great frequency in the Honorverse (as in real life). In the Honorverse, they are frequently called “OFS Peacekeeping Missions,” but other people have engaged upon them with depressing frequency.
The Mesan Alignment can argue — or could argue if it was prepared to admit it existed — that the defenses of the Manticore Binary System were so powerful as to preclude any other form of attack on Manticore’s war-fighting capacity. Within that argument, the nature of the attack on the system’s spaceborne infrastructure was entirely legal under the accepted Rules of War. If one puts a military target in orbit around one’s planet, one has to be aware of the possibility that if the military target is attacked and destroyed, debris from it will fall into your planetary gravity well. In fact, the Manties were aware of the possibility/probability and had contingency plans to deal with it. Those contingency plans failed — partially — because the attack came as such a complete surprise that there was no time to activate them. There is a huge difference between what happened to Sphinx as the result of orbital debris strikes which could not to be controlled and certainly were not directed to strike population centers or inflict severe loss of life from tsunamis and a deliberate kinetic strike on an inhabited planet with weapons no one could possibly argue were directed against specific military targets. It isn’t just a difference in degree; it’s a difference in kind, and it would be perceived as such by the inhabitants of the Honorverse. Please note that I am not arguing here that the recipients/survivors of this "collateral damage" would not be looking for the people responsible for it with blood in their eyes and vengeance in their hearts. Nor am I arguing that there wouldn't be significant penalties and reparations involved in any ultimate peace settlement. I'm simply saying that what happened to Sphinx as a consequence of Oyster Bay does not rise to remotely the same level as a deliberate genocidal attack on the same planet.
As for whether or not the Mesan Alignment cares about “respectability,” did you read my previous post? The Alignment is perfectly prepared to embrace less than “respectable” tactics when it believes those tactics will achieve its ends. The Detweilers, unfortunately for your proposed strategy, don’t believe that launching genocidal attacks — deliberate genocidal attacks — on inhabited planets will achieve their ends and do believe there would be a very significant chance of such attacks making it impossible for them to achieve their ends.
There is no conceivable reason for them to launch such an attack. Convince the Manties the Solarian League launched it? Ludicrous. No one in a position of authority in the Grand Alliance would buy that for a moment. Speed the breakup of the Solarian League by creating “warring factions” within the Assembly? Why bother? At the present moment, the Alignment’s plans for the destruction of the existing Solarian League are proceeding quite nicely. Whether they will continue to proceed in an equally satisfactory manner remains to be seen, but why in the world would they want to launch an attack which would have all of the negative consequences I outlined in my previous post (at least as far as the Grand Alliance is concerned, even if — as I do not believe for a moment would happen — internal debate within the League prevented it from accepting the Grand Alliance’s version of what happened) when the master plan already in play is essentially succeeding? You say “Using these feelings the MAlign could damn near start open fighting on the senate floor, let alone between planets,” but let’s be serious here. If the Assembly had any real political power to begin with, floor fights there might have some impact on the conduct of the war. It has no such real power so long as the present system remains intact, and there is no way in hell that planetary systems within the League are going to go to war with one another over differences of opinion about who launched a genocidal attack on a third party. You might accelerate the disintegration process by causing other Beowulfs to withdraw from the League in the extremely unlikely case that you managed to convince a majority of the populations of the planets in question that the League did it. Other than that, you accomplish nothing where the breakup of the League is concerned while running the very real risk of convincing significant portions of the League to believe Manticore was telling the truth all along.
The only potential upside to this from the Alignment’s perspective would be the possible destruction of the treecats as a species, which you apparently believe would make it significantly easier for somebody from the Renaissance Factor to infiltrate the Grand Alliance. It probably would make that somewhat easier, but not sufficiently so to come remotely close to justifying the potential negatives resulting from such an attack. And, by the way, planning it as a deliberate way to eliminate treecats assumes a considerably greater awareness of the threat potential represented by the ‘cats than anyone else — even in the Alignment — currently recognizes. Remember that the treecats are still in the process of coming into the open as bodyguards and partners. It will take some time for the Alignment to recognize what’s happening and begin factoring that into its planning, and while that time is passing, treecats will be establishing additional colonies on additional planets, precisely because of the species’ experience with Oyster Bay.
Moreover, even if the treecats were eliminated, the Grand Alliance is bound to start working on additional security measures, since there is after all a finite supply of treecats in the first place. Those additional security measures may not offer as many advantages in a single package as a treecat does (at least in theory) but people seem to be assuming that the treecats’ empathic sense is far closer to telepathy or mind reading that it actually is. They can tell when someone is deliberately lying; they cannot tell what someone is lying about or why that someone is lying in the first place. They can detect immediate threats; they cannot detect long-term threats which are not directed against a specific individual by a specific individual. That is, they may be able to determine that someone feels hostility towards another person, but unless they pick up the “emotional spikes” which go with an imminent attack, they will be unable to provide any greater warning than that. For that matter, it’s not as easy for even a treecat to parse human emotions as finely as some people seem to be assuming. The “mind-glow” is a kaleidoscope of emotions, many of which slide into one another without clear, discernible “edges.” It takes some sharply defining moment, attitude, event, whatever to provide the stark contrast which would allow a treecat to differentiate between (for example) anxiety, defensiveness, and hostility.
The only thing (aside from the problematic elimination of the “treecat threat”) which the Alignment be likely to accomplish at this point my launching a kinetic strike against Sphinx would be to further infuriate the one military and political opponent already actively seeking them, which seems like a pretty poor objective whether they are worried about “respectability” or not.
As for the strategy of deliberately marrying into the royal line in Manticore, forget about it. First, because the Alignment would never base any major component of its overall strategy on something as problematic as its ability to provide a suitably attractive suitor for some future monarch a couple of hundred years down the line (given that Elizabeth and Roger are both prolonged recipients). Second, I think that we can take it for granted that between Beowulf, Manticore, and Haven, someone is going to come up with a genetic screening process for detecting the various Mesan genetic lines. The Grand Alliance may not find the “inner onion” of the Alignment on Mesa, but it will certainly find plenty of genetic records, including those of quite a few people who are genetically Alpha or Beta line — the rest of the McBryde family comes to mind, for example — which will allow them to construct genetic profiles of Alignment families. Those genetic lines may be sufficiently broadly distributed in the general population as to prevent a suspect genotype from being automatic proof of involvement with the Alignment, but I will absolutely guarantee you that anyone the screening process flags will be exhaustively investigated before he or she is allowed anywhere near the heir to the Manticoran throne. His or her life will be put under a microscope that will go back generations, and the probability of something giving away even a generational sleeper in the face of that sort of investigation would be far too high for the Alignment to try it.
