The Problem with Haven

I'm sure they "voluntarily" requested annexation. And yeah, if you militarily control a system it's yours until you decide to give it up or someone forces you to give it up. Your behavior may fail to comply with certain treaties you solemnly signed, but until someone shows up with a bunch of guys with guns to make you comply, it's just words on paper.

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.

Wasn't the part when she had proof that he was doing something untoward very close in timing with his death? It would have been a major fight to get him out of office against his will without proof. A fight her nation might not have survived.

And unless i misrecall, there was NEVER solid proof that would hold up as legal evidence.

SWM wrote:Yes, as a matter of fact, Haven DID return it's own conquests back to their own governments if they voted to do so. Pritchart set up elections on all of the systems under their control, and allowed any that voted to leave the newly re-established Republic of Haven to become independent. And Pritchart was not demanding that Manticore turn it's conquests over to Haven; Pritchart was demanding that Manticore allow it's conquests to have exactly the same vote on whether to be part of the Republic of Haven that Haven's other systems already had been given.

I thought Pritchart's initial position was that the conquests be turned over long enough that Haven could supervise their independence votes (like they'd done for other systems).

(And RFC's post earlier today seems to be consistent with that)

That said, I doubt that full control of that vote would have been a major sticking point in negotiations. In fact I assume it was a position designed for potential compromise as the negotiations went on.


Haven should have been happy to settle on any formula that gave them assurance that those systems were getting a free, unmanipulated, and non-fraudulent vote on their self-determination. And that minimal goal could be achieved a lot of ways (mixes of who was providing security and who was observing the vote to look for irregularities or fraud), subject to mutually agreeable negotiations. (Assuming of course that real negotiations ever managed to start)

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but it wasn't Haven's correspondence that Giancola altered. He changed Manticore's correspondence once it got to him, BEFORE he presented it to Pritchart and the rest of the cabinet. That is how Elizabeth knew that Manticore's correspondence had been altered, because she's seen it. She couldn't have seen Haven's correspondence at the point of origin, so even if Giancola had altered it, there's no way Elizabeth could have known that it had been altered.

Nitpicking, I know, but sometimes the devil IS in the details.

Jonathan_S wrote:Haven should have been happy to settle on any formula that gave them assurance that those systems were getting a free, unmanipulated, and non-fraudulent vote on their self-determination. And that minimal goal could be achieved a lot of ways (mixes of who was providing security and who was observing the vote to look for irregularities or fraud), subject to mutually agreeable negotiations. (Assuming of course that real negotiations ever managed to start)

This was one of the very few times where Mr Weber actually frustrated the living daylight out of me, when I read the passage in Mission of Honor that dealt with this issue. I couldn't for the life of me understand what the differences were between the Manticoran and Havenite delegations' positions, despite having read the passage four or five times over.

What made that even worse for me, was the fact that that specific passage set the stage for giving Pritchart a chance to cut the legs out from under that obnoxious delegate (whose name I cannot remember), which makes it one of the more important scenes in the book.

It could be that I'm just too stupid to get it, or that I was too tired to differentiate such fine details, but whatever the reason, it left me frustrated as hell and just a bit confused.

But coming back to your point that Haven should have been satisfied with any solution that would have allowed those occupied worlds to decide their fate for themselves, I think Mr Weber has addressed that point satisfactorily in his earlier post. However, there are a few remarks I'd like to add.

Leaving aside all issues of popular pressure, national pride, principles of local self-determination etc., there is also the more pragmatic considerations which Pritchart, as a politician, simply wouldn't have been able to completely ignore, such as the fact that, as long as Manticore occupied those worlds, any revenue that those worlds generated (and some of them were really profitable economies, if I remember correctly) would go either to the occupation administrations or to Manticore instead of to Haven, whose resurgent economy dearly needed any additional revenues from those worlds - at least, until any of them decided to go their own way.

Mr Weber also mentioned the strategic motive for wanting those systems back - as long as Manticore held on to them, they nullified Haven's advantage wrt strategic depth. Essentially, because of Eighth Fleet's push to reach the Haven system as quickly as possible, the occupied zone presented an 'invasion highway' right into the very heart of the Republic (remember, the invading Manticorans were on the verge of attacking Lovat, just a few lightyears from the Haven system itself, when it received news of Cromarty's death and suspended operations).

hanuman wrote:Correct me if I'm mistaken, but it wasn't Haven's correspondence that Giancola altered. He changed Manticore's correspondence once it got to him, BEFORE he presented it to Pritchart and the rest of the cabinet.

It was both. Especially the last message where he removed "one little three letter word" which changed the message from "Trevor's Star is NOT included" to "Trevor's Star is included."

Weird Harold wrote:

hanuman wrote:Correct me if I'm mistaken, but it wasn't Haven's correspondence that Giancola altered. He changed Manticore's correspondence once it got to him, BEFORE he presented it to Pritchart and the rest of the cabinet.

It was both. Especially the last message where he removed "one little three letter word" which changed the message from "Trevor's Star is NOT included" to "Trevor's Star is included."

Ahh! Thank you for clarifying that.

Hi Hutch,

Just catching up on my reading back pages, and wanted to say thanks and please feel free to add any of the wisdom from your skeptic debates.

Kudos for your several excellent points, as usual.

Regarding Descroix, she was refusing to carry out her orders from the MAlign to get Manticore back into a war with Haven, but it still happened because she was a liberal idiot, and that's when she tried to run only to meet Isabel Bardasano, who killed her and disappeared the body with MAlign nanotech.

But I'm surprised when RFC demonstrates that the treaty has large public support in Haven, yet some people claim it doesn't, as we've seen so many times here on other plot points.

Regarding the sneak attack Janacek suggested; when I first read WroH, I was terrified he'd be stupid enough to do it, NTM getting most of the RMN destroyed.

It should have suggested to some readers that the RMN would have then been in the same position as many peep officers when they went to war, knowing they were in the wrong, and perhaps expanding their perspective as to who were really evil, and who were trapped into it.

I was really quite grateful to High Ridge for not being that stupid.

I would have liked some more exposition in the books on why Eloise was so worthy of trust and what she'd accomplished which RFC has shared here and the pearls [BTW, they're not working], but RFC has explained the limits of editing choices, including his latest interview someone posted of June 9th at San Francisco IIRC.

L

Hutch wrote:Ay-yi-yi-yi....

I am not going into the derailment (hell, the train wreck) except to say that personal testimony is the weakest evidence that there is for any topic, and I say that as a Card-carrying skeptic (James Randi Educational Foundation) who has debated (and followed debates) with UFo'ists, Bigfootists, Apollo Hoax believers, and 9-11 Conspiracy mongers.

Personal testimony can lead to hypothesis, at best; it cannot lead to broad-based conclusions and theory.

And that is all I intend to say on the subject.



Now, back to orginally scheduled program....

IIRC (several pages ago), the major point of contention was how far the SEM could trust Haven,and I will note that those who were skeptical of how far and how deeply the SEM was trusting a nation they had been at war with for the better part of twenty years. And they made some very good points.

However, I must disagree with them for several reasons, besides the storyline saying it is so, so therefore it is so (authors are like Gods in someway--often capricious while still being all-knowing... )

But I would note that the treaty was approved by the Haven Senate (including the military alliance) by a huge majority of the Haven Senate, who, being politicians, would pretty much have to know their planet's population views....and obviously thought the treaty was in their best interests (to get re-elected) as well as good for the RH in general.

As for Eliose going back to war, my impression during WoH is that she was fending off the 'war' party, or at least those led by Giancola who wanted a more aggressive approach to negotiations with the Manties. Prichard did most everything she could to get the Manticore Government to make a deal, and ran into the wall of indifference and Delecroixs' (sic?) fumbling (possibly intentional per direction from the MAlignment). All the while holding back those who woudl have pushed the Manties harder and if it led to a resumption of the war, so be it.

So Eliose was under the gun from both sides; given her background history, it is not too surprising that she eventually choose to fight rather than 'flee'.

One last point for your consideration; Manticore was still a threat--there is a passage in WoH where Janachek suggested one option to solve their problems was for the Manties to launch an 'surprise' attack on Haven, in effect do what Haven did some time later. While the Havenites did not know about that conversation, they certainly could credit that option to the SKM, and any state that is capable will protect itself from such occurrrences.

Again, I have not covered all the many and varied points made to date (that might cause my three remaining brain cells to overload), but I offer them for further grist for the mill.

IMHO as always. YMMV.

lyonheart wrote:But I'm surprised when RFC demonstrates that the treaty has large public support in Haven, yet some people claim it doesn't, as we've seen so many times here on other plot points.

Heh. Personally, I'd go with Mr Weber. After all, he is God of the Honorverse...