Some opinions on the current wars
Entry posted by Bob Janova
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Firstly, the Viridian war on Polar, which expanded due to the entry on both sides of several allies. The CB for our war is clear, laid out by Impero in our DoW thread and honestly I am surprised so many people seem to think it is weak. There are logs there of a foreign official discussing potential target alliances with a spy and telling him he should spy on VE, which he then did and reported back to the leader in question.
I am in Viridian government and have been fully in support of Impero's moves since the logs were first brought to us. Yes, Dajobo and Polar got played by Lennox, who wasn't really trying to help them get information, he was trying to start a war. But he still sent Lennox to spy on VE. As for jumping straight into war, the political moves recently meant that when a good reason for war was presented to us, against an alliance in one of the Orders' power spheres, it was likely to be advantageous to take it. That made it extra silly to provide such a good one.
Regarding the 'exposure' made by RV in World Affairs: a sting operation was carried out, after we had already received the logs and were fairly sure that there was a CB against Polar, to make absolutely sure that we weren't just being played by Lennox and that it really was Dajobo and Polaris involved. We did not set up the original logs, the meeting between Lennox and Dajobo or anything apart from the final screenshot handover that acts as final proof of Dajobo's involvement.
And secondly, the Doomhouse war on Pacifica, which is also escalating through the entry of allies – alliances which were tangentially bound to the Polar war but had found ways not to enter find their own power sphere (and MDP partner, in many cases) under direct attack and have to respond. While I can understand some of the reasoning behind this attack, I cannot support it.
I am not against pre-emptive or aggressive attacks in all circumstances. For example, one could argue that the Polar front of the War of the Coalition was pre-emptive, and it was certainly aggressive. I criticised C&G for playing the moral high ground card so strongly in Bipolar, because I believed TOP and IRON's move to mostly be a strategic mistake, rather than morally abhorrent as the C&G propaganda corps would have had you believe.
However, there are two things which make this attack unsupportable to me. Firstly there is the obvious hypocrisy. Some ex-Hegemony propagandists who care more about PR than I do have gone through the Bipolar War threads and selected some relevant quotes to demonstrate it, but I'm sure we all remember how MK in particular (but also other alliances now fighting with them or supporting them) railed against the injustice of the pre-emptive attack on them, and used it as justification for imposing very large reparations on the pre-emptive attackers. It is then deeply hypocritical to perform a pre-emptive attack themselves.
And the second problem with it is that it is not (unlike TOP and IRON) a genuine pre-empt. The NPO was attempting to stay out of the Polar part of this war – if the rumours are to be believed, going so far as to pressure mutual allies of the Polar and Pacific power spheres to find ways to stay out. That makes this not a pre-emptive attack, but simply an aggressive attack on an alliance at its moment of weakness. It is a sound material strategic move, but it is exactly the sort of actions that the Orders-led Hegemony was (rightly) demonised for.
A lot of nonsense gets talked about Karma every time there is political drama. But I, at least, did not fight Karma simply to put a new alliance at the top of the tree – and, in fairness, the 'better world' really has been better so far. Rolling alliances because you don't like them and they represent some vague threat in the future is something most of us explicitly fought against, either from a moralist platform or through the experience of it happening to them. Have MK really forgotten the lessons of noCB?
This war, or these wars, remind me strongly of the position Citadel found itself in in the War of the Coalition. We attacked Polar with a fairly good CB, but at the same time, some allies and allies-by-proxy attacked a related alliance with pretty much no CB at all. We ended up linked to them in the mess of coalition warfare, even though we were justified and they were not. Once again, my alliance and its coalition attacks Polar, and then a related but not aggressive alliance is attacked with (in this case literally) no CB.
The dogs of war are now well and truly loosed, and the political fallout will come later. But I would ask those who have attacked simply because they could to look in the mirror and to pull back from the abyss. Do not become what you once fought against.
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