Haven Victorious

Actually I was referencing GregD's post, and was too lazy to excerpt it.

fallsfromtrees wrote:You are apparently missing one of the key points in RFC's response. A private diplomatic mission, no matter how successful, would set a precedent that Elizabeth was NOT willing to set. Although it would undermine the current administration, in her view that administration was not going to last forever, and she didn't want the precedent of independent diplomatic missions - which might well be used to undermine the monarchy and a favourable administration - - it might not happen during her reign, but she wasn't going to saddle Roger with that problem decades or centuries later.

As I said, it's totally impractical as a concept. Just darn funny to contemplate the image of Honor showing up in the House of Lords saying "here, I did this worthless cretin's job for him. All in favor of a vote of no confidence?"

Just a reminder that AFTER Haven attacked the Manticore Home System and was soundly defeated. Elizabeth sent Honor- backed up by her fleet- to the Haven System to negotiate a resolution to the war.
Eloise understand exactly what is happening when the RMN shows up well out of the Haven system and a private yacht comes in. This is Elizabeth giving her a chance to stop the war and work something out.
Clearly Eloise- and her senior military people- understand that Manticore had the strength and the will to physicaly take the Haven home system and compel submission to terms and they can do that by smashing their way in and obliterating everything they think is in their way or would givve Haven any chance of doing anything but agreeing to abject surrender. After what has gone on with what Haven has done to Manticore, once the the RMN took the Haven orbital positions (and they would do that rather quickly) ANY resistance from the ground would not go well for Haven.
Ok, Eloise also understands that Elizabeth probably doesn't want to have to subjugate and garrison all of the PRH systems for decades to prevent Haven rising in another war, but Eloise's options are fairly limited with that fleet parked out there but Manticore is willing to talk- from a position of vast strength but still talk rather than just smash their way and then dictate terms from orbit. Does make a difference.

Dear RFC, you completely misread my post-- which is my fault for including that joke at the end!

My charge of negligence is about her actions BEFORE Thunderbolt, and has nothing to do with anything she "owes" Haven. It is about what she owes her subjects.

As you say, she's seen regime changes on Haven before-- one of the major drivers in SVW and FoD was that the Libs et al wanted to believe that the Pierre Coup could be a change for good that ended the war (ha!). And through them all, the Peeps had remained a vicious threat.

Which is why I think she was negligent as hell for not sending a treecat to Haven after the Theisman Coup. I cannot think of a single thing more important than knowing whether these were more leopards with the same spots, or tigers of a different stripe.

War or no, this DID have direct bearing on the safety of her people. If she'd been right and it had been nothing but domestic squabbles, the stability of the Republic and the decency of it's leaders would still absolutely impact any Manticoran who had to go into their territory for trade etc, any POWs she hoped to recover, any normalization of citizenship or just visitation for people from the PRH who'd fled but now might want to see family again, any hope of *any* agreements being honored. We've seen in our own world the risks of just visiting an oppressive state as a tourist, let alone all the other reasons one might need or want to go.

A discussion of *why* she didn't see the necessity, or any difference between Tom and Eloise and all the regimes who came before them, just loops us back to earlier arguments in the thread, so I'll leave that be.



After Thunderbolt, of course you're right. My little joke about the summit was just that: a joke about how I feel she was silly to do what her enemies wanted, not a serious policy suggestion. Although you basically just yourself pointed out that she could have said, "Fine, we can still meet. See you at Mount Royal Palace. Come alone..." (God, I can just imagine the look on Sheila Theissen's face...!)

runsforcelery wrote:Nor did Eloise and Tom have to launch their all out assault on Manticore when she called off the negotiations. They had an opportunity to say: "Well, we're sorry you feel that way, but we're still not going to shoot at you and we really hope you'll change your mind." Remember that one of their alternatives would have been to take no offensive action and agree to negotiate the instant 8th Fleet arrived in the Haven System. They didn't because they, too, were fallible humans with limited information and they took what they believed was the only option available to them.

Now there's something I don't think I ever saw discussed on-page that intrigues me-- other than obviously not wanting to lose the war because no one likes losing, and the obvious but unspecified "consequences for the Republic" that Tom so feared... why *did* they think the BoM was a better option than surrender?

Quite frankly, from Haven's side, Giancola was pretty much right: yes, High Ridge is corrupt as hell and yes, Elizabeth hates your guts and wants to burn you to the ground. Oh, and once the war starts, the SKM just outright conquers half Silesia for it's own gain, so definitely right about the expansionism. (Traitor and snake, not actually wrong.) Not great baseline trends for negotiation.

In-universe, Tom and Eloise (and Lester) knew-- they mention several times-- that the BoM would kill thousands if not millions of people even if they won. A price very nearly not worth paying. Yet if they didn't launch it, Elizabeth was refusing to negotiate... so one of their options should have been them just giving up and waiting for QEIII to do whatever she wanted to them?

Sure, the reader knows Beth's not a monster and won't exact the vengeance she wishes she could. So does the SKM at large. But did Haven? Or did they see the BoM as every bit the fight for their lives and futures that Manticore did?

Brigade XO is right that Honor showing up to negotiate made a difference. Before the BoM, Beth refused. After, she was suddenly willing, but there's no way they could have seen that coming. They couldn't know or trust that she would do so, or compel her to. I honestly don't see what other choice they truly had.

No one argues that Elizabeth should have surrendered when Lester arrived, even knowing that it would have saved millions of her people's lives. We expect Manticorans to fight to the death. I see no reason that Haven should have done any less.

Lift them skirts! Do peer under the skin!
But beware, sometimes they go commando.

Oh how I love this thread! But the demand on popcorn is approaching illegalities. One can keep just so much corn on hand before being suspected of distilling whiskey. LOL

GregD wrote:Elizabeth could have colluded with Benjamin, and HE could have sent "Steadholder Harrington" off to negotiate a peace treaty with Haven at any time.

It certainly sounds like a good idea, and that's what I think Harrington was ultimately supposed to accomplish. But, remember, there was no way for Beth to know how safe it was to send anyone. Let alone Honor. And if it was to be done, the most efficient plan would have been to include Honor, someone who can cross reference the cats emotions and someone who had become a formidable diplomat and politician in her own right.

Who thinks it would have been prudent to send anyone to Haven, let alone Honor, when it was still being run by Saint-Just, Pierre and Ransom? Or, if it was still being run by people like the above during Eloise's reign? It would have been tantamount to suicide. The only reason Honor ended up on a road trip was because she truly believed in the Peeps. And since Honor was a wanted criminal on Haven, I thought there was going to be trouble had it not been for Eighth Fleet. Honor's sentence was never officially dismissed was it?

At any rate, I think a field trip with plans to negotiate a treaty was too ambitious. Even Honor's mission was desperately conceived. A field trip to gauge the sincerity of the enemy should have been the mission, so that a treaty could be negotiated later and a true cease fire implemented now. Both Beth and Eloise had the responsibility and safety of her citizens weighing on her back. And neither operated in a vacuum.

But, Honor was the only one who could pull it off. Eloise trusted and believed only in Honor (as everyone in the galaxy did due to the integrity-laced seeds Honor sowed) and Honor trusted the Cats.

The time factor was the fly in the ointment.

NortonIDaughter wrote:As you say, she's seen regime changes on Haven before-- one of the major drivers in SVW and FoD was that the Libs et al wanted to believe that the Pierre Coup could be a change for good that ended the war (ha!). And through them all, the Peeps had remained a vicious threat.

Which is why I think she was negligent as hell for not sending a treecat to Haven after the Theisman Coup. I cannot think of a single thing more important than knowing whether these were more leopards with the same spots, or tigers of a different stripe.

A point to consider: immediately after the Theisman coup, Elizabeth could not know how stable Pritchard's government would be. Haven had seen two successful coups and at least two failed coups in ten years. Regardless of how genuine Theisman and Pritchard were personally, Elizabeth had to keep in mind that they might not be in power by the time a treaty was worked out.

It obviously didn't stop her from negotiating at all, but at that point she needed a treaty that even a possibly-belligerent government formed by a new coup would also find acceptable. Later on, as the stability of the new-old constitution and government became apparent - maybe the six months before Thunderbolt - then maybe Elizabeth could have risked negotiating around the High Ridge government and sent a treecat with the negotiator.

Also remember that treecats were just starting to use sign language a few months prior to thunderbolt. Even though a treecat could have read people as well as they could ever do, their ability to communicate their insights into a person's personality was lacking

Galactic Sapper wrote:

NortonIDaughter wrote:As you say, she's seen regime changes on Haven before-- one of the major drivers in SVW and FoD was that the Libs et al wanted to believe that the Pierre Coup could be a change for good that ended the war (ha!). And through them all, the Peeps had remained a vicious threat.

Which is why I think she was negligent as hell for not sending a treecat to Haven after the Theisman Coup. I cannot think of a single thing more important than knowing whether these were more leopards with the same spots, or tigers of a different stripe.

A point to consider: immediately after the Theisman coup, Elizabeth could not know how stable Pritchard's government would be. Haven had seen two successful coups and at least two failed coups in ten years. Regardless of how genuine Theisman and Pritchard were personally, Elizabeth had to keep in mind that they might not be in power by the time a treaty was worked out.

It obviously didn't stop her from negotiating at all, but at that point she needed a treaty that even a possibly-belligerent government formed by a new coup would also find acceptable. Later on, as the stability of the new-old constitution and government became apparent - maybe the six months before Thunderbolt - then maybe Elizabeth could have risked negotiating around the High Ridge government and sent a treecat with the negotiator.

Also remember that treecats were just starting to use sign language a few months prior to thunderbolt. Even though a treecat could have read people as well as they could ever do, their ability to communicate their insights into a person's personality was lacking

There are all kinds of reasons for Eloise not to have personally negotiated with or sent a special envoy, outside the High Ridge negotiators, to Haven. Part of it is constitutional, since she would have been stepping on a Parliamentary prerogative to do anything of the sort without the approval and support of the current government (which was High Ridge's). Part of it is that fact that she hated and distrusted all Peeps, and with damned good cause. Part of it was that as has been pointed out she had no idea if the Theisman-Pritchart government was ultimately going to stand or fall. Part of it was that the (accurate) rumors that Theisman had simply shot Saint-Just out of hand without even a pretense of due process left his escutcheon just a tad tarnished in her eyes . . . and suggested that he wasn't all that different from Saint-Just (and, of course, it was well known that Pritchart had been a leading terrorist, assassin, and murderer before the Pierre Coup and then served the SS as a political commissar).

My point here is that it would never have occurred to her to send a treecat-augmented "fact-finding mission" to Nouveau Paris for a whole bunch of reasons, including the fact that right up until the very verge of Operation Thunderbolt, the treecats wouldn't have been able to communicate very much except "we like these guys" about what they were picking up.

That, however, is secondary — if not tertiary — to the fact that all the evidence she possessed told her that there was no significant difference between the Theisman-Pritchart regime and the Pierre-Saint-Just regime. Both had come to power in a violent coup, both of them had ruthlessly eliminated the group previously in power, one of them was a self-confessed terrorist/assassin, and they were currently involved in a four-way (or more) civil war, so it wasn't at all clear for quite a while that they were even going to survive.

Frankly, it didn't matter who they were or how they might differ from the preceding regime(s). I mean, literally, it did not matter, for a bunch of reasons. One was that the Havenite navy was totally out-classed against the RMN. There was no way that any Havenite admiral was going to be stupid enough to go up against the Royal Manticoran Navy when Haven didn't even have podnoughts yet, much less the MDMs to put aboard them, and according to all of her intelligence agencies, that was the case. I mentioned that she had a little of the Manticoran hubris herself, but that's another way of saying that she was guided by the expert analysis of all of her intelligence agencies. And what they were telling her was that Haven had been totally defeated (militarily), whether or not Nouveau Paris had been occupied, and that — judging from the self-evident capabilities of the ships actually engaged in their civil war (bearing in mind that Theisman was deliberately concealing the existence of the SD(P)s being built at Bolthole) — there was no prospect whatsoever of Haven being able to successfully resume hostilities. That's why she was so focused on the domestic front.

From Manticore's perspective, at least until the existence of Havenite SD(P)s became known, what happened in Nouveau Paris and the rest of the former People's Republic's territory was up to the Peeps. It wasn't even on Manticore's radar at that point, and wouldn't be until it was clear that someone was going to win. That was the whole basis of Descroix's delaying tactic of "waiting until the situation stabilizes," and that tactic was effective because when she first began deploying it, it was totally apropos. Eloise and Tom's personal character really became relevant only after it was clear that the Theisman coup (unlike the Levelers and two or three other abortive attempts against the Committee) was going to stand. And even then, until they demonstrated that they had podnoughts of their own, there was no way that they represented any realistic threat to the Star Kingdom's interests or citizens.

From our perspective outside, looking in, and having lived behind Eloise's and Tom's eyes while they were fighting to redeem the Republic of the Péricard constitution, of course Elizabeth needed to send Honor to discover that, under the skin, she and Eloise were soul sisters. From my perspective as the author, that would have sort of tended to short-circuit the story line, but from the perspective of people living in the Honorverse, that would have been a far better outcome than Thunderbolt, the Battle of Manticore, and all of the hundreds of thousands of people who were killed. The thing is that it was not at all evident to people living inside the Honorverse, without that omniscient narrator perspective, and that Elizabeth's actions — and responsibilities — can be judged only on the basis of what Elizabeth knew and on her judgment as quite possibly the most experienced wartime head of state in the entire human-explored galaxy.

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And in response to why Eloise made the call for Operation Beatrice rather than simply telling Manticore "we surrender," I thought I had made the logic fairly clear in the book, although I may not have.

Haven's problem was that Manticore had just demonstrated the existence of Apollo (although Haven still didn't know all of its capabilities); Haven's attempt to arrange a summit to negotiate peace had failed (and been vehemently rejected by Elizabeth); it was obvious to Theisman and Pritchart that Elizabeth had decided there was no difference between them and the team of Pierre and Saint-Just; and if Apollo was put into full production and deployment, Haven's military position was hopeless.

The one point that I didn't mention in that paragraph is that the restored Republic was still incredibly fragile. Eloise believed that an abject surrender to Manticore would fatally undercut the legitimacy of her new government in the eyes of the Havenite electorate. That was also the reason that she couldn't simply tell Elizabeth "Hey, Arnie Giancola forged the diplomatic correspondence he showed us! Can we talk?" because the evidence that the ranking member of her Cabinet (remember, he was her legal successor under the Constitution if she died in office) had been guilty of treason would also have seriously undermined her administration's legitimacy, and that (by process of extension) would have undermined — indeed, probably fatally wounded — the Péricard Constitution she had fought for decades to restore.

That was the context against which she had to make the go/no go decision on Operation Beatrice, and at that time her intelligence people (who had been doing a pretty damned good job so far) did not believe Apollo was in general deployment. (In fact, they were pretty much right; it wasn't in general deployment, just closer to that than they had estimated.) So according to everything she knew, there was still a very brief window in which the operational and tactical balance of power would still be very close to even on a ship-for-ship basis . . . and the Republic had a definite edge in tonnage and total podnoughts.

If the Republic surrendered, or if the Haven System was militarily conquered, the odds favored the collapse of the restored constitution and Republic and the high probability that something at least as bad as the Committee of Public Safety would emerge to replace it.

If Operation Beatrice succeeded, Haven could extend the most generous terms imaginable to Manticore, and thereby prove that the restored Republic was not the People's Republic of Haven. And doing that, would give her administration, and by extension her entire government and above all the Constitution a degree of legitimacy that virtually no other outcome could have afforded.

This was a woman who had dedicated her entire life to restoring the Republic and who had seen the man she loved die in that Republic's defense. The restoration of the Péricard constitution was her memorial to her raped and murdered sister and every other human being who had been casually destroyed by the Legislaturalists and State Security. It was the vindication of all the friends she had sacrificed and lost in her long fight, and it was the justification for all the blood she had personally shed.

She was prepared to do whatever it took to honor her oath to "protect and defend" the Constitution of the Republic of Haven and the Republic itself "against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

So she did.

As it turned out, the discovery of the Mesan Alignment and the Manties' face-off with the Solarian League, gave Eloise a trump card which probably far exceeded the value of winning the Battle of Manticore, both domestically and — most assuredly — in interstellar terms. Unfortunately, no one in-universe could have seen that coming, and so she launched Operation Beatrice not because she wanted to, and not because she thought it was a good option, but because she thought it was the at least bad of the options available to her.

What!!!? It really is Christmas time.
Am I dreaming??? . . . Pinch. . .pinch. Ouch! This is real!

TOLD U SO TOLD U SO TOLD U SO TOLD U SO! TOLD. U. SO!

runsforcelery wrote:Part of it was that the (accurate) rumors that Theisman had simply shot Saint-Just out of hand without even a pretense of due process left his escutcheon just a tad tarnished in her eyes . . . and suggested that he wasn't all that different from Saint-Just (and, of course, it was well known that Pritchart had been a leading terrorist, assassin, and murderer before the Pierre Coup and then served the SS as a political commissar).

Do pardon my bold of the author's text.

OMG!

The exact same things I argued until I was blue in the face and green in the gills in a certain thread where I accused Theisman of - surely in the eyes of many Havenite citizens - murder! I also went as far as suggesting that Elizabeth wouldn't like Theisman's actions so much either! That thread was closed. I thought there'd be pitchforks at my door. Don't sugarcoat it RFC, Beth was astonished that Saint-Just was MURDERED! And if Beth felt that way, surely some Havenite citizens did as well! I said it was a bad way to begin the newly established Republic.

I'll take apologies from all of you anytime you like.

runsforcelery wrote:snip
That, however, is secondary — if not tertiary — to the fact that all the evidence she possessed told her that there was no significant difference between the Theisman-Pritchart regime and the Pierre-Saint-Just regime. Both had come to power in a violent coup, both of them had ruthlessly eliminated the group previously in power, one of them was a self-confessed terrorist/assassin, and they were currently involved in a four-way (or more) civil war, so it wasn't at all clear for quite a while that they were even going to survive.

My same point in that same castrated thread of mine. Theisman's actions made him appear as if he wasn't much better than the regime he replaced. And if Eloise would have at least went through the motions and charged him and then had the charges dismissed, at least it would have appeared that she took the Constitution seriously and Beth would have taken note of that!

runsforcelery wrote:Part of it is that fact that she hated and distrusted all Peeps, and with damned good cause. Part of it was that as has been pointed out she had no idea if the Theisman-Pritchart government was ultimately going to stand or fall.

My point here is that it would never have occurred to her to send a treecat-augmented "fact-finding mission" to Nouveau Paris for a whole bunch of reasons, including the fact that right up until the very verge of Operation Thunderbolt, the treecats wouldn't have been able to communicate very much except "we like these guys" about what they were picking up.

My point as well. She didn't trust the Peeps, so there was no reason to send Cats to discover what she already knew. If she had thought there was a chance thst the leopard's stripes had changed, then . . .

So you see Peeps! It doesn't matter when all of you disagree with me. It doesn't change the truth!

.

I am going to expand on RFCs comments - but won't bother clipping it, as it was long.

Remember from the book, Eloise and Tom had no proof of Giancola's treason - just suspicious pointers. Any attempt to trot that out is going to look like a attempt to purge her political opponents on trumped up evidence (and since he is dead, blaming someone who can't fight back) - highly suggestive of the tactics of both the Legilaturists and the CPS, and would have certainly doomed the government and constitution.