Eddington stated he led them to victory so I imagine if anything the Maquis actually liked him. "This former security officer has repeatedly attacked the Cardassians, and given Starfleet a bloody nose." "I want to follow this man." The dialogue indicates everyone somehow miraculously escaped but I could not suspend my disbelief on this issue-civilians likely died old people, children, non-combatants just so Sisko could get his man. That in my book is a war crime.
Hell, by that standard I could choose to believe Kira was never a resistance fighter, Odo was never a shapeshifter, etc. You're choosing to disbelieve information only because it doesn't support the conclusion you want to draw. I didn't realize "got wiped out by the Dominion" counts as a victory. And Eddington isn't a reliable source of anything except pro-Maquis propaganda. Please stop drinking his Kool-Aid.
What part of the dialogue snippet that was provided was unclear? The atmosphere gets poisoned and the Maquis immediately begin evacuating. Or are you claiming that Sisko's officers lied to him?
We have to assume the toxin took an incredibly long time to work-an hour to a few hours defeating the whole point of such an operation. Let's assume it was 50 minutes to one hour before the toxin spread throughout the atmosphere and rendered human life impossible. Now let's imagine the Maquis don't have very big ships and not that many ships to begin with-you see they have light cruisers, freighters, the occasional stolen cardassian ship and whatever defected federation officers brought and maaybe stuff from the Klingons. Now let's assume this Maquis colony has at least 100,000 people maybe spread out, maybe concentrated. Though they each present their own problems in an evacuation. Furthermore the DMZ was at this point a high combat area-so dozens of cruisers aren't going to be available to evacuate the colonists some are engaged in combat, raiding, scouting etc... We'll say ten at most light to medium cruisers-the people are rushing to get to them. Transporters are overloaded, people are handing up their children first doing anything to survive. While this toxin disseminates throughout the atmosphere. There is simply no way all these people assuming a population in the hundreds of thousands can evacuate fast enough. Normally I'm willing to look beyond the screen and off page and use my imagination to fill in the blanks. But in terms of IU consistency all those people escaping doesn't work. If they had say a day or a week sure-I'd believe it. But Sisko wasn't giving Eddington a day or a week.
I don't believe any Maquis planet had 100,000 people on it, which rather invalidates the rest of your calculations.
I would trust Eddington's statements less if they were ever contested by Sisko or anyone. Sisko in Blaze of Glory states that "he led them to their grave." This is not denying his military success. He doesn't tell Eddington "you led them poorly" or " they would be alive and successful if not for your poor military leadership" Obviously Eddington's leadership combined with being thrashed by the Klingons so greatly distressed the Cardassians they joined the Dominion. No one ever contests Eddington's claims of victory and prowess. They say that it's consequences were negative but that isn't the same thing as saying they didn't exist or weren't successful. As for numbers I go by Eddington's statements "your talking about turning hundreds of thousands of people into refugees." Even if we assume this is more than one planet-this indicates the Maquis population in the DMZ at least on certain planets was rather dense(as colonies in Star Trek can be).
Eddington's statement is based on Sisko's announcement that he is going to do the same thing to every Maquis colony in the DMZ. Given the seeming large number of planets that seem to be out there, I can buy that. Every time we get an episode in the area its at a new planet and they and the Voyager group mention even more. Of all sizes, but most are going to be hundreds of colonists, with some being maybe a few thousand at the most. There should only be a very few large colony world out there that come anywhere close to even ten thousand people given where they are and how long most have likely been there. And given that nearly every star system seems to have at least one M-class world or at the very least a D-class world with a mining colony on it, there should be plenty of planets spread across the long Federation-Cardassian Border regions, which is probably more like a giant blob of Federation space clinging to the outskirts of the Cardassian Union for hundreds of light year from the upper to lower part of the spiral arm and than across the arm for several hundred light years as well. The DMZ only being maybe five to twenty light years across I guess. Far enough to spot ships entering it and have the ability to do something about it before it entered your own territory. But also enough to have multiple star systems across it, with half being on the Federation side and half being on the Cardassian side.
The problem isn't that Picard couldn't have gotten the Romulans in the war. He was already on assignment leading the first fleet in defense of the Federation, but he could have been reassigned. The problem is that fans seem to think Sisko was not competent enough to bring the Romulans into the war without selling his own soul. And I call BS in that. "In the Pale Moonlight" made for "drama," but just think of all the good drama we'll get when Trump nukes NKorea to solve the a problem and we move on, past the casualties, and into a world in which we can use nukes on each other whenever we fail to hammer things out better than we should have at the table (i.e. forcing our Chinese friends and NKorea's supreme enablers to take action before we were left with an existential threat to deal with by a loony man-child.) Sisko could have done more. Did he once talk to Ross or the Federation president - did we get good scenes about it - about a legal plan to get them in? No. He called Garak to do it dirty on the down-low. That was not a plan befitting his rank.
I concur-it was a very much a Section 31 sort of operation. Dirty, carried out in secrecy, and without the slightest measure of decency or legality(any approval given by Starfleet command was probably given after the fact or only to a general plan) If Trump nuked or invaded North Korea speaking of that issue there is a chance the Chinese would attack the US as they wouldn't want a pro-US Korea with US troops on the Yalu River. An equivalent would be trump and the CIA somehow faking or manipulating a North Korean attack on China and getting them to join in on the attack.
It is almost impossible to suspend disbelief that so many people could have been evacuated in time to escape Sisko's wmd. The logistics of evacuating thousands of civilians is extremely difficult. Sisko gave them hardly any warning, and apparently the wmd poison took immediate effect in atmosphere from what was shown. Remember the real world situation of the Katrina hurricane on New Orleans. The people of NO were given ample warning of the storm, yet so many people failed to evacuate to safety for whatever reason. I assume there were many settlers and their families in the Maquis colonies who were ranchers, farmers and homesteaders. Meaning that they lived beyond Maquis towns. It would seem logical to assume that a significant number of colonists would have been unable, unwilling or uninformed about the need to evacuate. They would have wound up being casualties.
Ensign Ro gave us some perspective on that. She talked about how some factions were more radical than others. Picard wanted to bait a more conservative faction into a trap by creating a target so tempting that they'd commit all their forces. I sympathize with Ro and the Maquis in that episode totally. Besides his duty and faith in the treaty, I feel like Picard just hates them, or can't tolerate the very idea of them. He was just supposed to gather intel on them. I don't remember Nechayev saying to capture all of them. A week earlier she was telling Sisko "Go talk to them. They are still Federation citizens. Reason with them." A week later she understood and sympathized with them more. Picard didn't seem to share that sympathy, or have any ideas for solutions other than capturing them. What was he going to do with them? There's only a handful of episodes where I get irritated with Picard, and this is one of them.
Finally somebody who understands my point about civilian evacuation and WMDs. Your right a lot of would have been casualties.
Poisons like that in the atmosphere should take days to maybe weeks to spread out enough. If it is anything like radioactivity in the atmosphere, it will take about a week to ten days to cover half the globe. The colonists have time, and transporters. And since they are fighting the Cardassians, probably have evacuation plans for their relatively small population.
Exactly. Evacuations at that point would have been expected, and Sisko's actions, though reprehensible, were designed to provide time for the Maquis colonists to evacuate.
Another thing we don't know is the exact nature of the toxin on Humans. There are a bunch of things that are fatal to humans that don't equal immediate death or even death in a few days. One thing I thought was strange was that they swapped planets. The entire reason there is an issue in the DMZ is because people refused to leave their worlds. Was it part of the deal Sisko force on them? Or maybe an act of contrition by the remaining Maquis? They already had the Cardassian worlds after all and given the available tech a poisoned world isn't so uninhabitable (or for as long). DS9 treated Vulcans no differently than any other of the shows nor did Sisko have a disdain for the Vulcans as a people.
Sisko had a disdain for a specific Vulcan who had been a rival it seems since the Academy days...the Vulcan apparently being the instigator of one-upmanship to prove Vulcans are superior to humans. The Maquis poisoning was designed to either eliminate or force the Cardassians to leave nearby worlds, but leave the planets still viable for other lifeforms, such as humans, thus allowing the Maquis to expand into the Cardassian colonies in the DMZ (the ones still on the Cardassian side of the border I would hope, because if they did that to the Caardassian populated worlds on the Federation side of the border...that would be an act of war against the Federation.) Sisko decides to do similar to a Maquis controlled world to feed Eddington's complex and get the man to stop. The result is the Cardassian and Human colonist switch planets, but it is unclear what side of the border they are switching on. The situation doesn't change much if both worlds are on the Cardassian side of the border, it just makes it an even exchange for Eddington's hide. If it was on opposite sides of the border, than the result is basically what the original treaty spelled out anyway. One guesses that if given the choice, people would rather not leave their colonies, because moving would require effort...not moving doesn't require one to do anything until the new regional power authority person arrives to present to your officials what the laws are in your new interstellar power controlling body. That you might have issues with. In Cardassian law you are assumed guilty and basically presentenced, the trail to show that justice is working. I can't see too many ex-Federation worlds handling that well in the DMZ.
Regarding rapid evacuation, the Maquis should be considered a special group in this respect - they would be well-prepared to uproot themselves at the drop of a hat, what with a certain neighbor of theirs wanting to bombard them to tiny bits, and another wanting to throw all of them to one of 'em asylums for the criminal=insane. This should be quite possible in practice: some of the paranoid guerillas standing vigil right next to their spacecraft, the others always wearing their communicators so that a transporter evacuation to the ships can be conducted at a moment's notice. It's really just the reverse of the thousand people on the E-D evacuating in mere minutes in "11001001" - the ships involved are smaller but there are many of them, and the presence of transporters on them is all but assured. The problem with "For the Uniform" specifically is that the only reason the Maquis would agree to evacuate is if they knew they were under lethal attack. But the one Maquis who is in speaking terms with Sisko indicates he doesn't believe in Sisko's declaration of impending doom in the slightest. So why do the Maquis evacuate? Because their sensors tell them there's a dangerous agent in the air after all? More probably they only turn on their sensors because people everywhere suddenly do start dying... Timo Saloniemi
^ Why would they only turn on their sensors after the attack? Given Eddington put in the call to Sisko not long after the Defiant entered orbit of the planet suggests that they had to be monitoring the situation. They would be crazy not to keep an eye out for the Defiant after Sisko gave them the when, where and what it would be up to. We also hear that the evacuation happens pretty immediately, which suggests that they (Eddington or those on the planet) took Sisko warning seriously enough to be ready to evacuate on the drop of a hat shaped torpedo. As for deaths, Eddington doesn't mention any either. If Sisko just killed dozens of people I doubt Eddington would not use it to dissuade Sisko of his actions. It would be a better thing to use (or in combination) with the plea not to displace a large population.
The specific sensors to sniff out trilithium before it starts killing people would probably be specific indeed. Would the Maquis even have those? OTOH, trilithium is supposedly a routine element in starship maintenance, so the possibility at least exists. This opens a can of worms, though. Sisko scraped together enough trilithium to commit planeticide - from just one little ship. The dozens or hundreds of ships down on the planet (any planet) should pose an immense risk to the planet just by existing, then. Why aren't more planets dead? And if means exist to fight trilithium contamination, why is Sisko's threat effective? But they'd count on Sisko being the crazy party. And in the "that's just crazy talk" sense, too. On the other hand, if Sisko's coming to get them, it's pretty much immaterial how he's gonna get them. It's time to flee in any case. But here's the key issue: the Maquis on the planet would be inclined and ready to flee. But what about the other people? It's Sisko and Sisko only who says everybody down there is a criminal and fair game. Would the people down there believe likewise? Wouldn't the first reaction be "Ah, the Maquis will leave in any case, and then we can tell Starfleet that they're gone"? On both of those issues, that's just the beginning. The evacuation isn't completed while we watch. And Eddington has no time to assess damage while we watch. Possibly so. But if Sisko had already killed, then this can't be reversed - but OTOH it won't be repeated, either, as the upcoming victim worlds will evacuate in time. Trying to dissuade Sisko might backfire if Eddington just rubs it in his face that he's a mass murderer who has burned all his bridges including the one he's standing on. Timo Saloniemi