Can We Say Garak Turned the tide/won the war?
- Thread starter Starfleet Engineer
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More likely the Vorta would've hid the news from the Gem'hadar and organized some sort of orderly retreat. Or some Vorta would try to, and others would break down in open religious despair, leading to civil war in the Dominion.
Even if the Gem'hadar did go postal, that would probably making fighting the ones in the AQ easier (no strategy against you), and possibly make fighting those in the Gamma quadrant unnecessary, as they'd likely die of withdrawal before making it through the wormhole.
The Dominion surrendering instead of being beaten is a big difference. Even after the Romulans turned the tide against the Dominion/Cardassian alliance, everyone was convinced that even just a year or two of stalemate would be more than enough time for them to build so many ships and clone so many soldiers that the AQ still wouldn't stand a chance against them. And that was a small pocket operating far from the homeland.
If the Dominion were defeated, but didn't surrender, that would essentially amount to nothing more than a period of hiatus in the war, lasting just until the Gamma quadrant forces managed to gear up again. Certainly none of the AQ powers were in any shape to invade the GQ.
Maybe it was part of why she agreed to it, although her repeated willingness to shut him out kind of undermines her talk about how important he is to them. Ultimately, though, I always thought it was Odo's choice to stay, because he knew he was in a unique position to turn cease-fire into actual peace. With just the cure, the Founders would've continued ruling the Dominion as they always had, and the odds of a second Dominion war happening eventually would be pretty high. With Odo joining the link, though, he at least has some chance of convincing them to change their ways and preventing that from happening.
By this analysis--they, the Dominion, will just keep coming--Sec 31's genocide of the Founders is the only way to save the AQ and probably humanity in particular, which I bet would have been selected for special use, like the Vorta.
The Dominion are the aggressors at this point and a completely existential threat, not just after territory but conquest, subjugation, even extermination or worse. Whatever they bring on themselves, they bring.
I too often read out-of-hand condemnations of sec 31's bioweapon tactic. Not saying that's you, just using a launching off point.
All I know is it would have ended the Dominion threat FOREVER. A threat to MANY races. They would have eaten themselves up in the GQ.
The AQ alliance may have contained the Dominion fleet around Cardassia, but that is not the same thing as saying that the Dominion threat was contained. Indeed, the dialogue between Sisko, Martok and Ross suggests that they would still have significant production capacity, which with some extrapolation, would have been located in other parts of the Cardassian territories. Moreover, we have little indication that any sort of rational thought among either the Vorta or Jem'hadar in the absence of the Founders. They would carry out their war orders in absence of the founders, become a zombie force in both AQ and GQ.
Finally, Section 31's disease raise the terms of the conflict for the Dominion, being one that was about territorial control and security to something existential. The stakes were raised too higher for conventional diplomacy to have taken place after the containment of the Dominion fleet.
If anyone should be credited, it should be Bashir for retrieving the cure.
They were already going to conquer us/AQ, enslave us/AQ, and maybe mutate us. How much more can the stakes have been raised?
What's this about containment? This is about cutting it down at its uniquely vulnerable source forever (vulnerable in a way the Borg ae not).
The virus would have killed the Founders forever. The Jem'hadar would hardly have taken orders from the Vorta, whom they held in complete contempt. Most likely most Vorta would have been killed within days of the death of the last Founder. And the Jem'hadar, those in the GQ, dying of white withdrawal, get here how?
No sir. Kill the Founders and it IS over. Even with one last paroxysm of violence from the Jem'hadar, it is over. If force isn't working, all that means is you haven't used enough of It; in this case, for sure, genocide works. Maybe more than in any other case of a controlling power/polity, because the Dominion is SO reliant on its species caste system.
The Dominion=The Founders/Changelings.
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Genocide.
As I wrote above, Behr et al eschewed easy solutions. If they were to continue the story beyond WYLB, containing Cardassia would not have been the end of the war. There would be new allies, factories pumping out fleets and soldiers, reinforcements from Breen, etc.
Besides, as we know from the invasions of Russia, it is possible to continue a war after a capital has fallen or has been otherwise threatened.
Rewatch Rocks and Shoals.
I don't think we can compare this species interrelationship to Russia. In fact this seems like a 3-cushion shot to me by sec 31; and unlike in Russia, almost all the people die. Also, most have zero way of getting to us. I can't see a single way the Dominion continues the war against us beyond a last tantrum of violence before annihilation here by what forces are left in the AQ.
As for their aims suddenly becoming upped to genocide, I would say their aims of conquest amounted to the same thing, especially when I consider the likely fate of humankind. Nor do I think your enemy's death throes being messy are a good reason to withhold your best strike.
But I'll do a rewatch of Rocks and Shoals to see what you might be suggesting. I'm already doing a rewatch of all Vorta eps, starting with To the Death, which I had forgotten being so damn good, because it really is.
I am pointing out a legitimate historical example in order to point out what is possible in the context of warfare.
Simple stroke of the pen: if Behr wanted to continue the war, it would have. The notion of a decapitation strike providing a definitive end to hostilities has proven to be largely ineffective.
The definition would seem to be different.
Because you may well be at the end of your own resources (something suggested in the dialogue of WYLB). And certainly you would want "the deaththroes" to affect one's own citizens, would you?
ETA: Moreover, you would be better off if your post-war occupation were more of an administrative mission with peacekeeping rather than an active force trying to root out opposition. The latter has more often than not proven to be ugly.
It probably would have. But Star Trek and the Federation are always about finding another way, respecting life, etc. They even negotiated with the Borg, and that's several orders of magnitude higher than the Dominion.
In my mind, the entire point of that plot was that it was Odo's decision to go back to the link and educate the founders which brought hope not only for lasting peace, but for a new Dominion that actually treated life with the same respect as the Federation. Basically DS9's version of turning the Klingon menace into the Federation's greatest allies.
I think you're glossing over some very important details in there.
Number 1: The Jem'hadar take orders from the Vorta. That is 'the way of things', 'obediance brings victory', etc. The only way the Jem'hadar ever turn on the Vorta is if someone (a founder or more important Vorta) orders them to, or if they go crazy from withdrawal. Except for that one unique guy who somehow wasn't addicted to the White, but he was almost certainly a genetic anomaly to start with.
Number 2: Our view of the normal state of affairs in Dominion dealings is extremely skewed due to the heavy focus on the highest echelons of the war effort. It was actually stated outright in dialogue that most Jem'hadar never even see a Founder.
For those 2 reasons, the question of what happens to the Dominion when the Founders die is pretty much entirely dependant on how the Vorta react. They could hide the Founders' deaths and try to hold the Dominion together. They could publicly announce it, and the Dominion would fall to pieces. More likely (since Vorta seem to run the gamot from massively narcissistic to deeply religious), there wouldn't be any real concensus on what to do, some would try to hide it, others would try to tell and the Jem'hadar would be caught in the middle trying to figure out who was telling the truth. That probably leads to civil war, but civil war doesn't necessarily lead to the fall of the Dominion. (What with the founders being 'gods' and all, it's possible the Jem'Hadar would almost unanimously side with the Vorta who are lying about the Founders' deaths, because only a heretic would believe the Founders could ever be annihilated.)
About the Jem'hadar taking orders from the Vorta: I just watched First Omet'iklan obliterate Weyoun 4 again in "To the Death." Also, the Jem'Hadar are not easily deceived--they knew of the Iconian gate and weren't supposed to. They would eventually know the truth of the Founders, one way or the other, and they are not so slavishly compelled by mere instinct that I have seen that they would follow Vorta who just give them pretty lies. And that--killing Weyoun--happened without the postulated knowledge that the ones they actually revere--the Founders--are gone. So there's the answer to Jem'hadar take orders from Vorta. I think the remaining Vorta would be running for their lives.
After that, number 2 doesn't really matter so much, except that the Dominion would be so caught up in internal conflict--at best (for the Dominion as a whole)--that they would have scant resources or time to attack the AQ, and would be even more vulnerable to more sec 31/Federation machinations. Still a win.
Also: I can't see a war against an existential threat as the time or place for "ethics" that get everyone whose lives you are responsible for killed or worse. Ethics should not be a suicide pact. If a polity is so fatheadedly "noble" that, by refusing to consider certain actions that some (and only some) of the people who comprise it may consider unethical or wrong in some sort of internal, absolute sense, it allows its people to be subjugated, mutated, or killed in huge numbers (which would have happened as a precursor to subjugation by the Dominion), then it is not acting in the interests of the people it governs, in this case, the peoples of the Federation, and is hardly ethical or better by that reasonable standard. The Federation owed every effort to protect its peoples and no other.
And: lives matter in an absolute, ethical sense. I refrain from killing even an insect where I can avoid it, because that life I might cut off is living its one chance to know the universe, and who am I to destroy that at a whim, for no ecological reason? (To be sure, I do draw distinctions. An ant invasion must be dealt with. But spiders (yes, arachnids) can cohabitate (this has earned me some funny looks from some girlfriends. But not from all.))
But what I mean is the taking of even one life of any kind, sentient or not, carries a gigantic ethical burden. Now make that billions, trillions, and sentients. And not protecting=taking when you are fighting an enemy like the Dominion, who will attack and hurt your people as surely as a hurricane making landfall. (And let is not forget that the Founders are in fact motivated at their core by a deep racial-species prejudice and hatred, and so can't even really be said to be so sympathetic in their motivations--I find their explanation of their persecutions in the past as present motivation inadequate in the extreme for so advanced, intelligent a people. Just not good enough to justify their continued panspecies hatred and fear of solids.)
The government directly responsible for all those Federation lives can't escape that moral judgment--they are appointed to choose. Them and their people, or the Dominion?: who is more important? They must make that choice because they were chosen to make it. Should they choose the Dominion?
I want to clarify that after reading this thread I DO subscribe to the viewpoint that no one event won the war against the Dominion. I am convinced on that score; the arguments are very good and I would no longer give more than a high (but not majority) percentage to sec 31's efforts. BUT, given a starting point that the Dominion will keep coming, and coming, and coming, eventually, no matter what, even after the victory we saw, then I have to plump down firmly on the side of killing all the Founders. Except, I guess, Odo. Sorry Odo.
And maybe even him. Because if someone can figure out how to make more Changelings out of his liquid tissue...If he had to be assassinated at some point, well, think of it like the model 101 Terminator having to go into the molten metal in T2. Good guy or innocent who still had to be sacrificed for the sake of billions of lives. But in the case of the Federation, maybe closer to a trillion plus.
The needs of the many.
Huh. Self-fulfilling prophecy for the solid-fearing Changelings. They truly brought it all on themselves, at least when they chose to regard the whole AQ as nothing more than more hateful solids. THEY needed to consider that at least the Federation was different. Does anyone doubt that the treatment they might have received from the Romulans or Klingons was worlds different from the treatment they would have gotten from the Federation, had they not reacted in such a knee-jerk, solids-are-really-just-trash-and-scum-of-the-galaxy fashion? They were the hideously shortsighted ones.
An entire species is far more than a decapitation strike. It isn't comparable to taking out one leader and his closest staff, for example, at all.
I don't see what the showrunners' choice here means. We are positing in-universe events given the choices that did occur as not arguable. We can predict and postdict, but we have to accept the way it DID unfold as what actually happened.
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I recall in one episode where Enabran Tain thought that only the Founders distributed the white to the Jem Hadar, so that by wiping them out, the Jem Hadar would be wiped out.
Then later we find out that it is the Vorta that controls it.
In fact the Vorta seem to run the Dominion on a daily basis.
It is possible that the Dominion could have kept running indefinitely without them, but like it was stated already that would depend on how the Vorta reacted.
If most of the Vorta never saw a Founder, it might be easier than suspected.
Then later we find out that it is the Vorta that controls it.
In fact the Vorta seem to run the Dominion on a daily basis.
It is possible that the Dominion could have kept running indefinitely without them, but like it was stated already that would depend on how the Vorta reacted.
If most of the Vorta never saw a Founder, it might be easier than suspected.
one of the best episodes ever. Live it and totally agree. Not bad for a Taylor
With a close-run thing like the Dominion War one could pick out any number of things that might have changed the outcome. But there are also any number of other ways Our Heroes could have won in spite of those changes. What if Jadzia had been hurt less badly in "Change of Heart", or if Worf had continued extracting Lazaran and let Jadzia die, Lazaran's information could have helped the Federation win much more easily.
A better way to think on it is that Garrak, due to his specialized experiences and understandings, was likely the only one of our heroes to so change the outcome of the war with a full realization and deliberate intent. The war turned on many people and many points. But Garrack was one to clearly see the levers, know where the fulcrum was and to intentionally push. Most of the rest got lucky. Or had a good idea. Or won an obvious battle. Garrack understood the moves ahead. He knew to setup the board.
"That's why you came to me, isn't it captain? Because you knew I could do those things that you weren't capable of doing. Well, it worked. And you'll get what you wanted: a war between the Romulans and the Dominion. And if your conscience is bothering you, you should soothe it with the knowledge that you may have just saved the entire Alpha Quadrant, and all it cost was the life of one Romulan senator, one criminal... and the self-respect of one Starfleet officer. I don't know about you, but I'd call that a bargain." - Garak
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