But if saying that the Project would have failed no matter what happened is silly, then all these fantasies people spin about how some super stong Confed spearheaded by the Black Lance would have wiped the floor with the Bugs without even breaking a sweat are equally silly, no?
Oh, absolutely -- as I said, it's silly to say that something *would* have happened either way. In this case, I think the closest we could come to saying something like that the project was created with such a goal in mind. But to equate this with something automatically happening *is* silly -- the Behemoth being built didn't automatically mean that the Behemoth had ended the war and blown up KIlrah.
The simple fact is that we didn't choose the route the Project wanted us to take, kept our freedom and our democracy, met the invasion and crushed it, all for a fraction of the casualties that using the Gen-Select on *one* heavily populated World like Earth would have caused. That victory is the ultimate proof that the Project was wrong.
Well... the jury may be still out on whether or not the invasion has been shattered.
As for our democracy -- I'm curious to know why everyone brings this up when talking about the events of WCIV? Certainly it, again, seems attractice to think that an evil organization is trying to take out mom, pop, apple pie and the American way... but they were, in fact, *not*. Keeping our civilian government was important to Tolwyn (FC) -- he just wanted to place Confed in a horrible war that would have "strengthened" it. And he did so *because* of our the actions of our democracy -- their descisions (declaring martial law, funding black projects, initiating the GE project) allowed him to exist.
That having been said, you must admit that it was only in his jailcell that Tolwyn realised that he didn't need to 'separate the wheat from the chaff'. This implies - at least to me - that earlier, he had in fact intended to purge most or all of the human worlds using bioweapons. Even if he decided to only purge most of them (or to only purge them a few worlds at a time, since as you point out, he wanted a protracted war), I think the economic damage would have been significant in Confed's post-war situation. I mean, even prior to being exposed, Tolwyn was already hampering recovery by shoving more resources than necessary into the military (Vesuvius project in particular). We should assume that had he been successful, the result would have been even more resources into the military; no economic recovery, and on the contrary, plenty of economic downfalls due to the war.
That's a lot to discern from the short, vague 'thoughts' of someone whose sanity is even now being debated at these boards.
Tolwyn's ultimate goal was certainly more 'enhanced' humans -- but his plan was that we *fight* to 'separate the wheat from the chaff', just like the Kilrathi did.
The economy one is a non-issue, too -- Tolwyn wanted us to be more like the Kilrathi... *constantly* fighting. When the war was over, he'd probably have engineered a battle against the Firekkans or the Varni or somesuch race.
Finally, yes, it is very attractive to claim that evil always looses in the end. Yet in this case, we have plenty of evidence that it was at the least quite likely. Look at the number of defections that occured by the time Blair finally defected. If this is what happens on one carrier, we can assume similar things were happening on others.
Disagree -- Lexington was the project's "host" carrier, replaced by the Princeton. Defections were certainly more heavy onboard those two ships, which were at the front *performing* the project's black ops... although I'm sure that had an actual war broken out you'd see pilots from the Border Worlds defect back to their homeland...
On capships where there is no defect option because there are no fighters, we can guess this would translate into mutinies.
Guh? People on the Lexington (well, a *few* people -- there are thousands of people on a carrier, several pilots defected) defected because they knew something was wrong -- they'd been involved in grabbing the biochemist, they'd encountered project personell in person and so on... your average destroyer or what-not doesn't have this view of the situation.
And then there's the BL, who would have provided a few defectors of its own ("And I couldn't go on!"). Would all this have been enough? Maybe not, but it certainly would have made things much more difficult for Tolwyn.
I don't see where you're going -- there's defectors in *every* war... why does this somehow completely change the shape of this one?
Add to it the fact that the Landreich seemed to be on the verge of intervening - they were already lending fighters, and full-scale intervention would surely have been the next step (not much of a fleet, but the BW and the FRL combined start adding up to something).
I don't think that's the next step at all -- lots of countries have claimed solidarity with the US in this current war on... wherever it is we're at war on right now, but I don't think anybody expects that their next step will be "full scale intervention". It just doesn't make sense to automatically assume that all of these things *will* happen. Kruger provided replacement parts for the Intrepid -- that doesn't mean he's going to comit his entire fleets to defend someone elses nation.
And the Kilrathi too, were being forced to defend themselves, at least - so maybe an alliance here is also not inconceivable. All this, in my opinion, leads logically to the assumption that the BL really didn't have much chance. Tolwyn was going for war far too early - there's a reason why Hitler didn't attack in 1934.
The BL wouldn't have been a single organization, though -- they were trying to seed war *between* all these groups. Involving the Landreich and the Kilrathi, and weakning the ultra-powerful Confed with defectors... even if these things happened, they'd be a *help* to the project, because they'd draw out the war between Confed and the Border Worlds.
