Direwolf18 wrote:DrakBibliophile wrote:I suspect that major difference between Manticore's efforts and the US's efforts is that Manticore's government is better set up for a very long term effort.
IMO a ruling monarch (like Queen Elizabeth) doesn't face re-election and can focus on things other than the "next election".
An elected President can start a long-term project only to see the next President just discard the project.
A Manticorian Monarch can exert his/her considerable influence to keep such a project going even in the face of a change in government.
Good case in point is the US Space program. We get a president who supports it, gives them the funding to do something, and next thing you know the new guy guts NASA to the bone, or in some cases starts amputating said bones altogether.
The biggest differences are two in number:
(1) Manticore went
into Masada in the reconstruction phase, not in the conquest phase. A huge part of the Bush Administration's problems (and missteps) in Iraq stemmed (IMO; I'm not trying to start any flame wars here) from the same sorts of over-optimistic assumptions and lack of clear, analytical thinking which characterized the initial Allied (and especially US) attitude towards de-Nazifying Germany after WW II. The nasty Nazis had hijacked and brainwashed the German people. Once the German people had been forced to confront the truth about the Nazis, their war crimes, and the Holocaust, the German nation would be well-behaved once more and well on the path to recovery. As part of the process, obviously anyone who had ever been a member of the Nazi Party must be banned from political office and purged from the (rebuilt) German police and military organizations. This, however, overlooked the centrality of some of those one-time members of the Nazi party to their national and local economies and societies, and it was just a tad difficult to rebuild a military and/or police force from which anyone who’d ever had any affiliation with the Nazi Party was unacceptable for military service. I’m not arguing that retaining ardent, unreconstructed Nazis in such positions would have been a good idea; I’m simply pointing out that this view of things grossly oversimplified exactly what membership in the party had meant, how some people had gotten there, and the extent to which people who’d lonce been members of the party could become something else. It also overlooked the pragmatic consideration that making bricks requires straw. That is, that one cannot always have what one
wants to have and that the secret to accomplishing one’s goals depends on making the best — and most realistic — use of what one actually
does have.
In the case of Germany, a little thing called the Cold War supervened and policies changed quickly in Western Germany which, coupled with the Marshall Plan led to the "German Miracle" which rebuilt West Germany's economy. The problem wasn't with the Allies'
intentions in Germany's case, or with their post-war
objectives (at least until the Cold War came along and they realized Uncle Joe was just as cynical a practitioner of real politik as Churchill had warned everyone he was) so much as it was a misunderstanding of the political and economic terrain and a failure to think through their post-war plans as thoroughly as they had threshed out their plans for actually fighting the war.
In Iraq's case, the Administration made the huge error of concentrating a hell of a lot more thought on how to
defeat Saddam than it did on carefully — and
realistically --- analyzing the political, economic, and social structure of Iraq and planning just as carefully on how to
replace Saddam with a reasonably stable regime. The notion of disbanding Saddam's military without creating a new one or giving thousands of young men whose only skills were with weapons different employment was . . . not optimal, shall we say? The enormous underestimation of the bitterness of Sunni-Shiite hostility and that the teeny problem that the guys who planned the war didn't take into account little things like the fact that Iraq was an essentially socialist economy with the government as the primary employer (which meant that if you were going to overthrow that government
you had to figure out a way to keep the economy running instead of relying on "unleashing capitalism) provided plenty more of the same sort of forehead-smacking, "D'oh!" sorts of moments. And it was unconscionable that it took so long for people to start figuring out what they'd gotten wrong and begin getting at least some of it
right. That doesn't mean that it
couldn't have been gotten right from the beginning, however, in which case I suspect the results would have been very different. If nothing else, the US public's war weariness probably wouldn't have kicked in anywhere near so soon if there'd been a public perception that the Administration had a reasonable (or at least clear) policy towards rebuilding Iraq and was pursuing it steadily.
Manticore started, in Masada's case, with the military conquest of the system and planet as the response to aggression by the existing system government. It hadn't had any reason to expect it was going to need a "Masada policy" prior to that event. Instead, it found itself with a sudden, unexpectedly acquired military and moral responsibility it couldn't (and wouldn't) walk away from by simply declaring victory and going home. Because of that, it consulted very carefully with
Grayson in order to gain insight into and as much indepth understanding of and insight into Masada (and conducted its own analysis of Masada based on firsthand observation)
before formulating its post-conquest policy. In addition, the SKM’s policy
goals were very clearly enunciated from the outset, as was the SKM’s willingness to be flexible in its
means for achieving those goals. That is, the policy’s strategy was very clear, the policy’s pragmatic constraints and opportunities were as carefully analyzed as possible, and the policy’s
tactics were subject to continual critical evaluation and modification in light of actual results and newly observed/detected/created realities on the ground.
Which brings me to ---
(2) Continuity of policy. One may take whatever position one wants on whether or not the Iraq War was a good idea to begin with and also on how well the post-military phase was conducted by the Bush Administration. Unfortunately, policies, whether good or bad, have consequences and create the starting point for any
new policy. A hallmark of US policy over the years has been that administrations frequently ignore the fact that even policies against which the newly elected president campaigned bitterly and with honest outrage are still the starting point for where his own policies begin and that anything constructive he intends to accomplish has to springboard from that starting point. This has accounted for many a whiplash moment in US policies, domestic and foreign alike, and I would argue that the result has very often been far, far worse than might have been accomplished by a more gradual modification of the existing policy, even if it was a bad one to begin with.
This is not, of course, unique to the US experience, but one advantage of hereditary forms of government (I am sometimes tempted to say the
only advantage) is that there is far less pressure for the "new broom" to "sweep clean." Policy discontinuities can still be wrenching (as an historic example the shifts following Henry VIII's death between Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth), but I think there's been a somewhat better chance historically of continuity. The huge differences in Manticore's case (as opposed to the US in Iraq) is that (a) the monarch has a greater degree of constitutionally protected control over government policies, both foreign and domestic; (b) the SKM's system
is hereditary and the monarch cannot be simply voted out of office, (c) that both Elizabeth and Roger are prolong recipients, and (d) that the entire Masada situation emerged from a lengthy Cold War just as it started to turn hot.
As a result of (d), the situation vis-à-vis Grayson and Masada is much closer in American experience (and attitudes) to the situation vis-à-vis North and South Korea than to the war in Iraq. That is, Manticore is making a substantial but not enormous investment of manpower and economic and military resources in stabilizing (or helping to stabilize) a relationship of huge importance to a local regional ally, although in this case Grayson is actually a lot more akin in importance to Manticore to Western Europe's importance to the US rather than South Korea's.
As a result of (a), the monarchy's commitment to staying the course in Masada's case is vitally important. If the monarch says the SKM is staying, then the SKM is by God staying, whoever the hell gets elected PM, or there will be hell to pay and no pitch hot domestically.
As a result of (b) and (c), the monarch doesn't have to worry about being voted out of office, which is a huge boon to maintaining continuity of policy at the national level, and the
same person is likely to be monarch for well over a century, which is an even greater boon to continuity. And one of the implications of this which is equally important, in my view, is that virtually all of the fanatics who are likely to prove truly intractable are
not prolong recipients. If you assume that Elizabeth is 45 at the time (I think she's actually a little younger than that) and that she will live to be 250 T-years old, she has another 210 years on the throne, barring accident or abdication. If you assume that the average Masadan reactionary was also 45 at the same time (the real hardcore reactionaries were even older) and that in the absences of prolong they will live to be no more than 110, then they have only 65 years left before they're all dead, and they will begin becoming increasingly irrelevant within 20-30 years. That gives Manticore a huge advantage in successfully restructuring the planet
as long as nothing happens to change the monarchy's policy objectives in the interim.
