Was Cardassia doomed all along?

[Timo]

Erasing entire species would not appear problematic for the Dominion. They don't want to rule by virtue of being too nice to be toppled. They don't want to appear to be the lesser of two evils. If they encounter resistance, they do the most horrid thing possible to turn this into an example. And genocide just doesn't happen to be the most horrid thing they can do, as per "The Quickening", so certainly this wouldn't hold them back from practicing genocide as a fairly routine measure.

Terminating every last Cardassian would be unlikely to backfire: it would cost the Dominion no points in Alpha or Gamma, and would win them some, in the game of maintaining control over Solids.

But if we talk the long game, is total extinction of non-Founder life among their goals? Vorta propaganda mentions 2,000 and 10,000 years of utterly dominant Dominion history, variously: the setup was founded 10,000 years ago ("Dogs of War") but has endured for 2,000 years ("To the Death"). Perhaps these millennia have been well spent exterminating Solids, but there's so many of them that enough still survive to serve as subjects to a facade of Dominion? We don't learn that the Dominion would need the subjects in order to survive, any more than Nazi concentration camps really needed their laborers in order to function. The subjects may be more a queue than a continuum here...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bad Thoughts]

They forgave Odo.

After they punished him. That kind of forgiveness is cheap.

 

[Tosk]

All they cared about was the link and Odo was one of their own. Even humans will forgive their family members things, that if a stranger did they would want them hung, drawn and quartered.

My only point was that they can forgive.