The Dominion War was Good for the Federation

I was watching Chucks review of The Maquis, Part II and the thought came to me: The dominion war was good for the federation.
How could any war be good for the Federation? War is horrible and should be avoided when it can. Billions died in the dominion war, how could anything good come from that?
All that is true. War is horrible and should be avoided and any loss of life is ultimately unnecessary however sometimes war (for one side) is unavoidable.

Look at the situation with the Maquis. The federation signs a treaty (with a nation that is clearly expansionist) in this treaty the Federation gives up territory that includes inhabited world with Federation citizens. The Federation abandoned its citizens to the Cardassians (who's government was less than humane to say the least). When these Federation citizens fought back against the Cardassians they were treated as the enemy.
In short the Federation gave away Czechoslovakia (don't know what I mean buy that look up the history of WW2) to a third rate power that was governed by a brutal police state all to avoid a war, a war that would have probably happened anyways given the expansionist and racist nature of the Cardassian government.

The Federation wanted to maintain peace at all costs, it wanted peace for the sake of peace. The Federation wasn't willing to go to war even with a third rate power who will go on to get its ass handed to it by militants. Instead of standing up to the Cardassians they just gave them what they wanted (more territory) and if it wasn't for the Maquis and the Obsidian Order getting it self wiped out the Cardassians would have eventually demanded more. If the Maquis never formed and the worm hole was never discovered war between and Cardassians was inevitable.

This federation is very much a Picard Federation, a Roddenberry (post insanity (At some point Gene Roddenberry went insane and wanted the Federation to be a socialist mary sue-topia that would make people who write horrible fan fics say "this is crap" (fortunately he died before he could tern TNG into full blown communist propaganda))) Federation a Federation that instead of dealing with an untrustworthy third rate bully of a power it would sign a treaty giving them what they wanted and even when they are blatantly violating the treaty the Federation would stick to the treaty and make criminals out of its own citizens when they are defending them selfs.

Okay the Federation were pansies how did the Dominion war help the Federation?
The Picard Federation believed that war was avoidable, that The Federation could live in peace with the other nations in the alpha and beta quadrants. This was the problem with the Cardassian situation; the situation could not have been resolved with out a war, just as Neville Chamberlain believed he could keep peace with Nazi Germany by letting Nazi Germany have the Sudetenland when (unless some one had killed Hitler) at that point war was inevitable. The Dominion could not be negotiated with. As soon as the Dominion gained a foothold in the alpha quadrant war was inevitable. The lesson the Federation hopefully learned from this is: sometime was is unavoidable.
How does that lesson make the dominion war a good thing for the Federation? The Federation could have learned that lesson in a smaller much less devastating war or even with out a war, the threat of the Dominion should have been enough to teach the Federation this lesson.
Yes. But history didn't play out like that and the lesson may have better been hammered in because of scale of the war.
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