I'm not sure why the Cardassians would have sent an unaggressive legate to the GBZ.
My suspicion is that the Cardassians haven't taken advantage of the situation because they've been having problems of their own, somewhere else in their space. We're not the only ones who have to deal with giant space monsters and spacetime malfunctions and warlike minor powers, after all.
Well, the original Cardassian strategy may have been built around the idea of using the Sydraxians as attack dogs while they, the Cardassians, simply took and held a sizeable 'bite' of the Expanse. Based on the precedent of how we'd been treating the Sydraxians from about 2307-12, this should have worked... but then we dropped Admiral Ainsworth on them instead and the Sydraxians were knocked out of the theater within a couple of years.
Remember, the Cardassians have plenty of different directions to expand into, and a very large amount of internal territory that presumably CAN be developed to supply them with resources. They don't need the Gabriel Expanse nearly as badly as the Apiata and the Sydraxians do, and maybe not even as badly as the Dylaarians do. As long as they get their share, and can seize forward positions that improve their lines of communications with any affiliates they gain to coreward of us, they've accomplished their basic needs. It's a place they can afford to be conservative
as long as they get some neat mining colony sites. And frankly, a conservative game of expanding gradually and fortifying your gains works pretty well for that purpose.
Why? You'll have to unpack exactly what decision we can make with that information, and provide evidence that the choice will be provided to us.
The thing about strategic level information is that without being able to predict what the information
is, we can't predict what it will be desirable to do with it. As you well know.
But I can easily think of many things we
could do with that information, as could you if you bothered to.
For instance, if one side is frustrated by failed offensives, we need to be on heightened alert for them trying any tricks that involve passing through our space. If
both sides take heavy casualties, we may need to be mentally and physically prepared to step in and broker a peace agreement. If our intelligence agents are actively working hard to procure information on the overall progress of the war, they may gain advance notice about Klingon/Romulan schemes that could bring us into the war, or trick their opponent into thinking we've become involved against them.
That's just off the top of my head.
I mean, not long ago we discussed the Honor Harrington setting in a tangent. Remember how stupid it seemed for the Solarian League to ignore a huge war going on relatively close to its core territory in which all sorts of advanced weapons and tactics are being tried and tested?
Yeah, let's not be those guys.
We've gotten factional information from diplomatic reports in the past, when it was less crucial.
The total amount of factional information we could use is rather large. I'm not going to assume that Oneiros will just give us a free detailed briefing on a multi-sided civil war purely because we asked for
one aspect of the collective policies of the entire species.
I don't expect any decisions related to the situation except external ones. Diplomatic posture will definitely help us decide what to do with the Gretarians and Yrillians, as those are directly diplomatic affairs. We aren't going to get the choice over how to interfere with the Sydraxians internally. There's no precedent for that.
The question is,
whose policy? If there are several factions with mutually exclusive diplomatic postures, we need enough information to have a clue of who's winning and how to react. Will trying to snip off the Gretarians from their influence strengthen a faction we would prefer to avoid strengthening?
