Beastro wrote:I liked the "genocide" bit, showing the limited options the Fed had in dealing with the Founders and having to resort to very unclean things that the Fed would normally be too stuck up to even consider.
One thing has to be made clear: This ended the war
You don't like that? Tough. Be like a Fed citizen that bitches like people do today about the nukes dropped on Japan. It doesn't change the fact that an enemy obsessed with murderous intent was able to be brought to the table and opened the way to a brighter future.
It is incredibly easy to make that case with the benefit of hindsight.
It ended the war, but only by incredible luck. In fact it only ended the war because Odo got cured and was able to offer that cure as leverage, something which does not appear to have occurred to Section 31 to do, likely because they dared not reveal the real nature of the virus - had that not happened, Sanders would have died and, based on what she herself said, let her last order be to the Jem'Hadar to fight to the last man while continuing to massacre Cardassians, costing countless more Cardassian, Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Breen and Dominion lives and made the Alpha Quadrant's victory very Pyrrhic. So, really it very easily could have been sort of the opposite of dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. It's questionable how much the virus hindered the Founders at all up until that point - it made them desperate, sure, and that might be part of why Sanders suddenly started giving (really stupid) orders when she'd previously been happy to "leave the war to the Vorta." And that desperation is exactly what let to this willingness to turn Cardassia Prime into a slaughterhouse rather than surrender. It's possible it would have gone down the same way had they not been infected and without the disease and cure as leverage it would have been a slaughterhouse, but it's also possible that without knowing she and her entire species were going to die Sanders might have been willing to die another day and, if not surrender, at least bed down for a proper siege instead of stupidly sending out all her people to kill civilians. Or maybe the Founders are just too stupid and proud to have ever surrendered regardless of how hopeless their military situation was and it really was the virus that saved the day, that's a matter of debate.
But hey that's also with the benefit of hindsight. So let's look at what they knew at the time they infected Odo.
The Dominion had been run by the Vorta for hundreds of years, to the extent that many of the Dominion's member species thought the Founders were a myth, gods that the Vorta worshipped but were not tangibly real. They were still scared absolutely shitless of the Dominion because as that Karemma dude put it, "You do what the Vorta tell you. Because if you do not, they summon the Jem'Hadar, and then you die." So the Dominion runs perfectly well with minimal to no interference from the Founders, check.
When the Cardassians and Romulans tried to destroy the Founders' homeworld, everyone flipped out because they were afraid the Jem'Hadar would "come screaming out of the wormhole looking for revenge." So there's a possibility of a long suicide rampage causing innumerable damage, check. Granted once the war started you can argue that's hardly going to make the situation worse, but they infected Odo
before the war turned hot . So they were clearly hoping to kill the Founders before war ever started, fair enough, but at risk of massive civilian casualties.
And they knew that the Founders were infiltrating all the other powers, therefore in a very good position to uncover a massive conspiracy that took dozens of people to carry out, perhaps even before you infect them all. In fact, I'm kind of amazed the Dominion
didn't figure out where the virus came from but there goes that hindsight again. So that long suicide revenge rampage might not be so random if the Dominion knows who killed their gods.
And do we know for sure the Vorta would just give up even if their gods were dead? Remember the Ship hadn't happened yet. They hadn't seen an example of a mass Jem'Hadar suicide following failure (they had of course seen the kamikaze of the Odyssey). We also already knew as an audience that there were other Changeling infants out there, so I'm assuming Odo had put that in a report somewhere along the way - presumably the Vorta knew too and I can see them keeping the machinery going (which they were more than likely capable of judging by the aforementioned centuries in which no one had seen goo nor puddle of a Changeling) while they wait for the return of the Changeling infants.
It seems to me, and maybe I'm an idiot, like a huge gamble to assume the species that can look like anyone isn't going to uncover your plan to poison them, and that they'll die before the cold war turns hot without every figuring out that they were victims of a bioweapon made by the Federation, and that the Vorta who have been running things for centuries will just be unable to or unwilling to carry on without them, and that even if the Vorta give up the Jem'Hadar are going to just politely kill themselves quietly instead of going on a bloody psychotic rampage possibly through your quadrant until they die of white withdrawal.
So yeah. Sorry. Were I a member of Section 31 around the time this plot gets in motion, I would object on tactical grounds. Then again I imagine there wasn't an abundance of other plans on the table that didn't involve rolling over and yelling "Ow not the face!"