DarkEnigma wrote:SNIP
I'll stipulate that Theisman was able to thoroughly clean house and remove all vestiges of the CPS. I'll also stipulate that the citizens of Haven are genuinely invested in their government this time around and are making every effort to help it work (you are in far better position than I to judge public sentiment after all). I would only point out, once again, that both the Legislaturalists and the CPS had recently (for prolong anyway) met their demises at the point of a gun. Any Manticoran analyst capable of wiping the drool off his chin is going to take note of that fact and be cautious of placing any long term bets on the fragile new Republic's longevity. A phased plan in which Haven meets some metrics of success before Manticore hands over the crown jewels seems appropriate here.
runsforcelery wrote:(3) In regard to whether or not the restored Republic under Eloise Pritchart was acting “honorably” before the resumption of hostilities and in the decision to resume hostilities itself, I would make the following points.
(a) The restored Republic had committed to allowing any star system which wished to leave the Republic to do so, and had in fact honored that pledge. They weren’t just talking the talk in this case, they were actually walking the walk, and they’d demonstrated that they were.
(b) The Pritchart Administration had been negotiating in complete good faith in its attempts to secure an actual formal treaty of peace which would officially end hostilities. As far as Pritchart was concerned, the only really “core terms” were the status of the populated once-Havenite star systems still occupied by the Manticoran Alliance. In effect, she was insisting that those populations be allowed to choose their own futures, just as she had allowed the systems which wanted to leave the Republic to do so. This happened to be something that was a serious matter of principle for both her and Thomas Theisman.
Such a matter of principle that she was willing to plunge two star nations back into war and kill hundreds of thousands of people to secure it? This, after all, is the crux of the entire matter: did Pritchart have an honorable justification to go to war.
I'll stipulate that Haven was genuinely giving stars systems they had previously taken over the choice to leave. I'll also stipulate that Haven (and Manticore) had every legal right to resume hostilities at any time, and that High Ridge was purposefully using that nominal state of war for callous political ends. However, Pritchart had to know that this situation could not last forever. At some point, High Ridge would
have to hold elections and have to end the pretenses with which he was stalling negotiations.
My question is, what was so pressing about getting these systems back that Prichart had to take such an aggressive posture such as having Tom Theisman wave a huge stick under Manticore's nose (and forcing them to respond accordingly)?
Was Manticore somehow abusing their captured systems? Would it have made any difference to Haven's captured systems if Eloise had adopted a "wait and see" approach until Manticore came to its senses?
Also, as you have stated yourself, Pritchart was open to negotiating
which systems were returned to Haven
at all (she was entirely willing to give up on Trevor's Star for example). Which begs the question, if she held it as an article of faith that Haven's former systems deserved self-determination, why she be willing to parcel them out in penny-packets over the negotiating table ?
Finally, as I recall, it was Arnold Giancola's plan to diffuse tensions between Manticore and Haven and thus be the hero, but even
he miscalculated Pritchart's bloody-mindedness. Is it at all possible that Prichart's decision to thump her chest and aggressively press Manticore over these systems was born of something less-than-honorable (such as pride, greed, or simple pique)?
When a honorable leader decides to go to war it should be because they have no other choice, but I still fail to see how Haven had
no choice but to go to war.
For the sake of time, I will stipulate to the rest of your points and concede that, once active hostilities resumed, Haven acted honorably. However, I wonder if you would be willing to answer a question that has been nagging me since it doesn't seem to jibe with my assessment of Elizabeth's character: Why did Elizabeth not push for total victory during Buttercup or after the Battle of Manticore?
P.S. Many people have up the fact that Elizabeth had Treecat lie detectors. This is true, however a Treecat can only tell you if a
particular person is being truthful at
this particular moment. They cannot vouch for that persons
future actions especially if that person is only one part of a much larger
polity.
You and I are going to have to agree to disagree on whether or not Eloise Pritchart was motivated by “pride, greed, or simple pique.” I put you
inside her head while she was debating these issues. I think, therefore, that you can take it as a given that the reasons I gave you for why she did what she did are the reasons that she did what she did.
You say “When a honorable leader decides to go to war it should be because they have no other choice, but I still fail to see how Haven had
no choice but to go to war.” So as I understand what you’re saying here, unless Manticore actually dispatched fleets to resume the military offensive against the Republic of Haven, Eloise
always had another choice. The fact that Manticore was refusing to negotiate meaningfully, that Manticore was refusing to even discuss returning occupied territory, that Manticore had a decisive technological edge if it did decide to resume hostilities, that Manticore had (belatedly) resumed construction of the additional capital ships which would have given it back the decisive military advantage within six months, that Manticore didn’t change its negotiating stance a single millimeter
at the same time that it reactivated its construction programs, and that the current Manticoran government was clearly falsifying the diplomatic correspondence passing back and forth between it and the Republic, didn’t constitute a situation in which she had a right to believe that she had “no other choice” but to resume hostilities — in an
existing, ongoing war where no final peace settlement had even been
provisionally accepted by the other side — if she was going to procure a final peace settlement that recognized the core objectives of the Republic and gave it the opportunity to get out from under a Manticoran Sword of Damocles?
Manticore posed an existential threat to the restored Republic because it had steadfastly refused to allow the war to be settled — settled on terms which Pritchart recognized were not going to be 100% satisfactory to the Republic, which had been defeated — and because its technology and general war-fighting capability remained superior to the Republic’s. Pritchart was dealing with a regime which she
knew was dishonest, unscrupulous, and corrupt, and she’d seen plenty of evidence during her own lifetime in the People’s Republic of Haven of what unscrupulous and corrupt politicians were willing to do in terms of finding external threats to bolster their domestic political position. She had to know that at least until the High Ridge Government discovered the existence of Theisman’s rebuilt Battle Fleet, High Ridge would have been prepared to launch a “short, victorious war” against the Republic
any time he felt his domestic position crumbling. Whether or not he could have gotten away with that is another question, but certainly nothing that she’d seen out of Elizabeth Winton suggested that Elizabeth wouldn’t (justifiably, in large part) have gotten behind a resumption of hostilities, whatever High Ridge’s motivation for embracing them, and pushed.
Eloise and people like Javier Giscard, Thomas Theisman, and the other members of her cabinet had paid in blood — in some cases for
decades — to get to where they were, with the restored constitution and the restored Republic. The refusal of the High Ridge Government to deal with the newly restored Republic honestly — or even to deal with it
at all — and the continued existence of a declared state of war (declared
by Manticore against the
Legislaturalists regime and continued against the Committee of Public Safety and
sustained against the restored Republic) presented a direct military threat to Haven. The fact that Manticore continued to occupy Havenite territory which contained Havenite citizens was a very high moral factor on her part, as well.
You are completely missing the point about Trevor’s Star and Pritchart’s willingness to negotiate which systems were returned to the Republic. She wasn’t especially concerned about regaining
uninhabited star systems, and in the case of Trevor’s Star, the self-determining elections —
which was all she was really demanding for the other occupied inhabited systems — had
already been held under a previous Manticoran government (Cromarty's) which she had every reason to believe had been honest. Now Manticore — in the form of the
High Ridge Government (which she had every reason to believe was as corrupt and
dishonest as the Cromarty Government had been
honest) — was refusing to allow the citizens of those occupied star systems any say as to what star nation (if any) they would belong to in the future. She wanted them back so that they could have that vote, and she also wanted that vote held before the Star Kingdom had time to change the history on the ground if that was what the SKM had in mind. And I would submit to you that she had plenty of reason to worry about whether or not the High Ridge Government was conniving at creating the same sort of "protectorates" out of those star systems as the Solarian League had been creating for many decades.
At the time that all of this is going on, Manticore is occupying half of Silesia (which it has turned into a protectorate and for which it has announced plans — eventually — to hold plebiscites in which systems may “choose” to join the Star
Empire of Manticore) and simultaneously is in the process of annexing the Talbott Quadrant. Eloise has never met Elizabeth Winton. She is seeing the Star Empire’s policies and actions through the lens of the next best thing to two decades of active warfare
and the “voluntary annexations” of numerous star systems (some of which she has just allowed to secede from the Republic) by the
People’s Republic, plus the imperialist policies of the Office of Frontier Security on the part of the Solarian League. She is
totally justified in assuming in the absence of
any evidence of High Ridge’s willingness to surrender possession of the occupied planets that he, at least (and, by implication, the rest of the Star Empire),
has no intention whatsoever of ever allowing them self-determination. Trevor’s Star exercised its right of self-determination in elections which were very open and where the final vote was
overwhelmingly in favor of seeking membership in the Star Kingdom. There was no question in Eloise’s mind that
that vote had been fair and open. There was also no question in
anyone’s mind that the High Ridge Government had completely
prohibited any similar votes for any other occupied Havenite system. So, yes, she was perfectly willing to give Trevor’s Star back. In fact, in many ways she saw Trevor’s Star as the trading token for getting the other previously Havenite occupied systems out from under the Manties at least long enough for them to vote, and she took the principle of self-determination by
all systems which had been occupied/conquered by the People’s Republic very,
very seriously. It was part of the Aprilists’ basic platform, and she’d never backed off from or renounced that requirement.
If you don’t already understand why Elizabeth didn’t “push for total victory during Buttercup or after the Battle of Manticore” after reading the books, I don’t think it’s possible for me to explain it to you, but I'll give it one more try.
Operation Buttercup
was a push for “total victory,” and one to which Elizabeth Winton had given the last thirty-plus years of her life. It was within her grasp. Then Esther McQueen killed Rob Pierre, Oscar Saint-Just killed the Duke of Cromarty (beheading the Cromarty Government and the coalition of personal alliances he’d built up to prosecute the war), and the High Ridge Government
accepted Saint-Just’s offer of a cease-fire and negotiations. Now, in theory, Elizabeth could have overruled High Ridge and the Janacek Admiralty and insisted on continuing hostilities. To do so, however, would have precipitated a domestic constitutional crisis in which she might or
might not have prevailed. People have made a big deal out of Elizabeth’s ability to carry a grudge and be governed by her “temper from hell,” but the truth is that if you go back and look at her decisions, she has
consistently accepted pragmatic limitations on what she could do at any given moment
unless she believed the fundamental security and survival of the Star Kingdom/Star Empire were at risk.In the wake of operation Buttercup, that was clearly not the case. In the
immediate aftermath of the cease-fire, the Star Kingdom’s military position was one of unassailable superiority. The People’s Republic was fragmenting in the process of Thomas Theisman and Eloise Pritchart's final overthrow of the Committee of Public Safety and restoration of the old Constitution. Theisman was already facing the first stirrings of the multi-sited civil war he was going to fight in defense of that restored Constitution. Until Theisman revealed the existence of his own fleet of SD(P)s,
Manticore could have defeated/destroyed the entire Republic of Haven navy anytime it chose, and that was true
despite the High Ridge/Janacek build down of the RMN. That entire calculus changed when Theisman and Pritchart announced the existence of their own pod-layers in large numbers, but it was certainly true immediately after Buttercup, which meant that she couldn't justify tearing the Manticoran constitution part on the basis of clear military
necessity.
Elizabeth faced a thorny domestic political situation, one in which the fundamental structure and balance of power between the aristocracy in the form of the House of Lords and the Crown and House of Commons would ultimately be determined, with far-reaching political consequences. At the same time, the crippled Republic of Haven presented no immediate threat to the Star Kingdom. And, while that was true, she was confronted by a new government in Nouveau Paris under the restored constitution which appeared
genuinely committed to dismantling the old
People’s Republic as thoroughly as Manticore ever could have. It was her opinion (correctly, as it proved) that eventually High Ridge would encompass his own political destruction and give her and William Alexander and their political allies the opportunity to cut his legs out from under him and
fundamentally reform the power balance in the Star Kingdom’s Parliament. At the same time, she clearly had a window in which to allow that process to mature
because the Republic of Haven posed no military threat to the RMN. And, finally, she was — despite her allegedly irrational hatred of all things Havenite — prepared to listen to advisors like Honor Harrington who suggested that what was happening inside the Republic would create a genuinely different star nation without the necessity of killing bunches of more people along the way.
When the Republic resumed active military operations, her faith in the difference between Pritchart and the Legislaturalists or Pierre and/or Saint-Just took a heavy hit. That was particularly true given the fact that she knew for an absolute fact that the diplomatic correspondence being published by the Pritchart Administration had been falsified. Moreover, she was forced once more into the “back against the wall” attitude of the early months of the
First Havenite War after the RMN’s initial defeats and the discovery of just how big and just how powerful Theisman’s rebuilt navy truly was. When the Star Empire had fought its way back to a situation
approaching military parity, and in the knowledge that Apollo was rapidly nearing deployability, she agreed to peace talks with Pritchart (despite her deep suspicion of Pritchart’s actual motives) until the Mesan Alignment-engineered murder of her ambassador to the Solarian League and attempted assassination of Queen Berry and Elizabeth’s own niece punched every — and I mean
every — emotional button she had. At that point, she resumed hostilities — against Honor and Hamish’s advice — and the result was the Battle of Manticore. Even someone named “Soul of Steel” could be excused for feeling just a bit shaken after a battle of that intensity fought in her own home star system. She couldn’t dispatch an
immediate Apollo-equipped strike against the Haven System without uncovering the
Manticoran home system, because Eighth Fleet was really just about all of the surviving RMN Battle Fleet and Haven possessed enough residual combat power to get in and devastate the Manticore Binary System if Eighth Fleet was withdrawn. By the time there were sufficient Apollo-based defenses in place (in the form of deployed system defense missiles) for her to release a significant portion of Eighth Fleet/Home Fleet for offensive operations, Honor had been given enough time to work on her to convince her to take another chance on negotiations,
as long as she negotiated on her own terms, with no opportunity for Haven to take advantage of the cease-fire or spin the negotiations out from their side the way High Ridge had spun them out from his side prior to the resumption of hostilities.
All of this was covered at one point or another in the books, although the process of Elizabeth grudgingly accepting that Theisman/Pritchart might be different from Harris/Pierre/Saint-Just and then reverting to “because they’re
Peeps” as the justification for believing Haven was responsible for the Webster assassination on Old Earth and the attack on Queen Berry and Princess Ruth on Torch that sabotaged the peace talks, wasn’t done in a “look inside her head” fashion. I thought it was pretty darned clearly implied, however.
As I say, if you don’t understand how that worked — or if you don’t
except but that’s how it worked — there’s not really much point in anyone arguing with you, because I think it’s pretty clear and totally consistent with everything you’ve seen of Elizabeth Winton’s character.
As far as the treecats' ability to testify as to Pritchart and Theisman's personalities and truthfulness, you are quite correct that these are only a very tiny handful of individuals, not an entire interstellar polity, and that political climates can obviously change. I've already explained to you why it is exceedingly unlikely, at the very least, that relations between the Star Empire and the Republic are going to go disastrously into the crapper after everything they have now been through as allies against a clearly identified common enemy who they believe was responsible for the initial overthrow of the original Havenite constitution and effectively
all of the bloodshed and destruction of the Havenite Wars. That may not seem sufficient for you; it does seem sufficient for Elizabeth and Eloise. Beyond that, what can I tell you?
), it became the People's Republic when the 