Was Ben Maxwell right about the Cardassians?

[Timo]

One wonders... There had been a goddamned war in the region until 2362 or so, and the Federation had not paid much attention. Why should a mere "incident" change things? Especially when the UFP apparently had deliberately chosen to ignore this region, and to give the Cardassians a lot of rope to hang themselves with.

And the "secret shipments exposed" thing still concluded in Picard demonstrating that the shipments could continue with impunity.

One might compare this to the late 1930s where the Nazis were caught red-handed on many an issue, and Mussolini gave them a serious slap in the wrists diplomatically. The suspicious paramilitary activities still continued, the distribution of supply assets for an extended naval raiding campaign (a close analogy to the Cardassian effort) proceeded at full steam, and standing policies regarding Germany were considered to remain standing, the recent victory over that nation still fresh in mind (again a decent analogy to the Cardassian situation). And the surrounding nations were not weak by any military standard - discounting the immediate buffers like Denmark, Poland and Romania, each and every one of them individually outmatched Germany in everything but audacity - so a degree of complacency was certainly warranted; all the more so in the case of the UFP.

Given how much the Cardassian Union was indicated to be an underdog in "The Wounded", an invasion timetable of three years of preparation cannot lightly be declared a "delay". For all we know, it was a move ahead of the original schedule.

Timo Saloniemi

[sonak]

uh, are you saying that the UFP should have been complacent because they had the advantage? It would seem that complacency would soon cause that advantage to disappear.

[Timo]

Not really, if the Cardassians were the local Panamians. You'd need at least three centuries of complacency to lose your lead and your astropolitically advantageous position in such a case.

"The Wounded" did show that Cardassian warships were made of cardboard, and that few in the UFP (or even Starfleet) had as much as heard of these bad guys being bad. If anything, the UFP would have gained a strategic advantage from ignoring these upstarts, thus denying them the status of "my enemy's enemy" amongst the other UFP two-penny enemies. And if the threat did increase, the Cardassians would nicely serve as an interstellar example when Starfleet easily defeated them with one shuttlecraft. Just as happened in "Chain of Command".

Timo Saloniemi

[Knight Templar]

I too always had the idea that the Cardassians were fundamentally a weak enemy of the Federation and were only a real threat when they could

1) Conduct operations in their own backyard like the Bajoran sector or mass large numbers of ships like in "Chain of Command"(and even the the Enterprise had no problems dealing with them).

or

2) Could find a powerful ally like the Dominion to carry their water for them.

[Mr_Homn]

It's a shame they never brought Maxwell back for Ds9. Would have been cool to see O'brien break him out of a prison, or even just get some valuable insight from him, and allow him a chance to redeem himself in some way.

A wonderfully talented actor like Bob Gunton, playing such an interesting and layered character like Ben Maxwell... A character that just so happens to be incredibly relevant to DS9's overall story... AND one of O'brien's closest comrades.. Huge missed opportunity.