Consequences
- Thread starter Dee1891
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No... but that could have made it a great twist.
It would have been quite hypocritical for the Romulans to call out the Federation for engaging in just that sort of activity which the Romulans themselves do all the time.
Well, sure, that's the nature of the beast; skullduggery is violently averse to standing in the light.
Why should they suffer consequences? In the real world people who do bad things get away all the time, and most of them didn't save trillions of lives in the balance.
Do we want a Star Trek that tries to teach us that the law is cosmically absolute and violating it is a fool's errand like a noir film in the 1940s or one that represents reality a bit more?
Do we want a Star Trek that tries to teach us that the law is cosmically absolute and violating it is a fool's errand like a noir film in the 1940s or one that represents reality a bit more?
I don't think the Romulans are bothered at all by a little hypocrisy in the service of the empire. It certainly wouldn't stop them from getting some political payback for being tricked into the war.
Consider how quickly the Romulans got on a war footing.
They didn't send in 12 ships after a month.
The Star Empire mobilized and deployed thousands of ships within days.
They had been building ships, training soldiers and mining dilithium, since the Ferengi bought their first barrel of Tulla Berry wine.
There may have been some question about which side they were going to join, or if they were only going to attack the Dominion after it had expended almost all it's energy stamping down the Federation, but despite what may come, the galaxy would never set on the Romulan Star Empire... Oh.
Oops.
They gave the Defiant a cloak, and let them keep it without oversight.
They knew this was the beginning of something big.
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I didn't "excuse" anything. I suggested how I think the Romulan Tal'Shiar, who are incredibly ruthless and unethical and perfectly willing to sacrifice their own people for what they perceive to be the "greater good", might have reacted to the discovery that Captain Sisko was involved in the assassination of Sen. Vreenak in order to influence the Romulans to enter the war.
At no point did I suggest Sisko's actions were morally justified, legal or ethical from a 24th century Federation perspective (minus Section 31, who are equally unscrupulous), or from even a modern perspective (for many countries), and especially not from my personal point of view, so I don't know where you are getting that from.
If I may put this differently: no intelligence and espionage agency, including the Tal'shiar, would use information that would lead to war. The pattern is to either push other nations to fight one another, or to use intelligence to gain an advantage in an existing war, or to push an advantage in a geo-political conflict. The one exception to this was in Improbable Cause/The Die is Cast, but at that moment, the Tal Shiar had been infiltrated and manipulated into pursuing an assault on the Founders. (nd look where that led.)
Nothing directly mentioning it, but several factors indirectly supportive of the idea being possible:
- The Tal'Shiar were an advocate of attacking the Dominion from well before the war even started, conspiring with the Cardassian Obsidian Order to build a fleet of ships in secret to conduct a genocidal orbital bombardment of the Founder's homeworld, but learning too late that their target had been a Changeling-inspired trap and the Founder's Great Link had been relocated elsewhere, allowing the Jem'Hadar to wipe out the fleets of two of the most ruthless intelligence agencies that stood in their way.
- The Tal'Shiar would certainly be familiar with Garak's presence on DS9 and his prior work and reputation from his time in the Obsidian Order where he served for some time as a "gardener" at the Cardassian Embassy on Romulus and allegedly assassinated several key Romulan officials, including a proconsul, a sub-commander, and an ambassador. That might have even been an early collaboration between the Tal'Shiar and Obsidian Order to take out Romulans who were opposed to the Tal'Shiar's way of doing things.
- In Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges, it is revealed that the head of the Tal'Shiar, Koval, while publicly maintaining anti-Federation rhetoric to conceal his true motives, is secretly working with not only Section 31, but regular Starfleet under Admiral Ross to bolster the alliance between the Romulans and Starfleet, and to that end, they undermine and frame Senator Cretak for treason so that she could not be promoted to the powerful Romulan Continuing Committee, which is second only to the Praetor in power, where she would have been the deciding vote in removing the Romulans from the Tripartite Alliance. So this is something they are perfectly willing to undertake to get their desired result, and it allowed the Tal'Shiar Director Koval to be elevated to the Continuing Committee in Cretak's place, so the Federation had a powerful secret ally in the second highest position on Romulus.
- The second the Romulans found out that the "Dominion" assassinated Senator Vreenak, they immediately mobilized their forces and attacked in-strength all along their borders and pushing the Dominion lines back significantly, almost as if they had been chomping at the bit, rebuilding the forces, and waiting for an opportunity like this to come. They knew the Dominion would not forgive or forget the Romulan attack on the Founder's homeworld, and that they would either be subjects of the Dominion or destroyed outright, neither of which sat well with them.
I don't even know where to begin with the idea that no intelligence agency would use information that would lead their nation into war. That is patently false and ahistorical on its face. Intelligence agencies provide information which leads to war all the time, in real life and in fiction.
Please read my next sentence: they want other nations to fight amongst each other. There are times when other branches of goverment use their intelligence agencies to justify war, but then it is not those intelligence agencies acting on their own.
Yeah, I read the whole thing. It's still absurd and ignoring tons of historical examples, including some very recent ones, of intelligence agencies providing information which bolstered or encouraged their nations to go to war.
It's not supposed to sit well with the audience. There are plenty of excuses as Sisko logs about, but ultimately it does not sit well with him, and the actions of the war do not sit well with Ross or Sisko at the end.
Whether or not the Romulans ever found out is largely irrelevant given the fact that Shinzon's coup wipes out much of the Romulan leadership.
Which examples? The CIA did not drag the US into Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union; it funneled arms and money to other fighters to fight for the US. The CIA did not drag the US into Iraq; it supplied intelligence for the administration upon its request.
Proxy wars are wars the US does not fight with its army. That's what the CIA is willing to support. In an article critical of how the CIA has been dragged into the war on terror, Amy Zegart writes:
Perhaps because they seem to be serving the geopolitical interests of the country, they seem like they would want to country to go to war. But that is neither its goal nor in its best interest.
There are many different types of covert intelligence. That's one of the reasons you see so many different intellifence agencies within the same country. For instance, NRO, CIA, DIA, NSA, etc (and many more, some unknown).
Even the UFP had that with both Starfleet Intelligence and Section 31, and again probably reasonable to imagine others. There is preventative intel, simply keeping track of other nation's economies, internal rivalries, their own diplomatic situations, troop movments, etc. You might very well have this level of close watching even on an ally because it is better to know what is going on in condition of "Trust but verify". Everyone does it, but its understood not to discuss it. Then you have someone like Assange who fucks it up for everyone.
There is intel more related to criminal activities.
There is intel to steal technological secrets, some of the more thrilling stuff, some of it right out of Mission Impossible.
And of course political disruption, elimination of individual threats, etc. Using intel to prep for war is done every single time. I can't imagine a nation (that wasn't suicidal and willing to lose a good chunk of its population) not engaging in this prior to beginning a war, or at least trying to.
Trying to get other nations to fight sounds like a good plot, and maybe it has happened occasionally but I suspect not so much. There are two many variables. For instance. you might see to having someone kill Archduke Ferdinand to allow Germany a convoluted casus belli to flex its muscle and become the premier power in Europe, thinking the Brits will opt to sit it out. But it only takes one stodgy diplomat concerned about his personal honor to screw that one sky high. It's too messy.
And that is done at the behest of other actors and agencies of the government, not by the initiative of the espionage and intelligence agencies themselves. I'm not claiming they don't get involved, but it is not in their interest (and generally not in the mission statements) to lead their own nations to war.
If your mission is to make such targets of opportunity available, then yes. The UFP had neighbors that, due to historical reasons, it had to regard as hostile.
Since you mention Ukraine in your subheading, I think that it is worth noting that the efforts of Russian intelligence agencies were very much intent on isolating and weakening Ukraine by diminishing interest in support the funding of arms by the US and other nations. The fact that Russia did go to war reflects the failure of those efforts.
Again, I'm not claiming that militaries and other government agencies don't make use of espionage and intelligence. However, all agencies have their own, often competing, interests, and the CIA (for instance) has different interests and motivations than the Pentagon. The article I quotes above explains this nicely.
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