Well, there are people in other countries who disagree with you in that.
Especially here in Germany, many people keep saying that a country or even a people can make mistakes and be guilty for something.
(BTW: Isn't it the same thing in your country? I guess there are still people in Poland who blame the Germans (all of them, as a people) for WW2)
I'm sure there are people like that - but there's people out there that believe all sorts of crazy things. Be that as it may, it's still entirely pointless. A group, by definition, cannot make a mistake - not unless it's a hive-mind of some sort. Even when a democratic country votes to do something, that's still not a common decision - you can blame someone for putting forth the idea, you can blame individuals for voting for it... but it's always individuals.
The reason why blaming an entire group is pointless is because there's no individual interest to it. I can say Germany was to blame for WWII - and yeah, obviously, Hitler was elected by a majority, so in a way it would be true. But what's the value in blaming Germany as a whole? Individual Germans can be blamed for voting for Hitler, but that's a collection of invididual decisions. Any one German could have voted differently, and it wouldn't necessarily have changed the final result - but that one German could obviously no longer be blamed.
Now, I would suggest that this discussion will only be interesting if we apply some basic rules. Firstly, let's talk about individuals, not groups. Even if it's a group decision, there's always gonna be some individual (not necessarily known by name) at the bottom of it.
Secondly, in asking whether a particular decision was a mistake or not, let's take into consideration two things:
- The decision-maker's state of mind and knowledge. If a decision had disasterous results, but the guy making it could never have predicted such a possibility... well, obviously he's still to blame for the disaster, but it's not a big mistake from his point of view. For example, that guy in Action Stations who failed to deliver the message on time. He is to blame for the disaster that followed, but there's no way that you could reasonably punish him for anything more than simple negligence (and perhaps dereliction of duty). He could not have known there was any possibility of such consequences. So, his decision can't really be considered a major mistake - it's a small mess-up that happened to have huge consequences.
- Context. It's dead easy to make something look bad by depriving it of context - but it leads to dry and trivial discussions. Take, for example, Hitler's declaration of war on the US. Taken out of context, it's a ridiculously bad decision - what was he thinking, didn't he have enough wars going on already? And so, all over the world, you've got otherwise intelligent historians railing about how stupid Hitler was, about how that decision was the final nail in Germany's coffin, et cetera. But if you put it in context, if you consider that the US was already fighting an undeclared war with Germany, if you consider that Roosevelt was already determined to do everything he could to help England... suddenly, it turns out that Hitler's decision was much harder to classify, it may actually have been the best thing to do at the time.
Because there were people who knew better. And we are speaking from hindsight. I think you are right, the average citizen probably welcomed the armistice. That doesn't mean it was the right decision, in retrospect.
See, that's exactly the problem with hindsight. You're not looking at that one particular decision - you're looking at an entire chain of decisions and events that followed. Because they all followed, it seems like they were all inevitable after that one decision was made. But that's not the case.
Ask yourself this - can the armistice actually be blamed for anything? In European history, there is a long, long tradition of enemies signing armistices for a particular period of time, with both sides fully intending to return to the fighting after that time has run out. Both sides would use this time to regroup, refresh their forces, et cetera. Now, this was clearly not what happened with the Kilrathi armistice. But it
could have. Especially after it was obvious that the Kilrathi were not disarming, the president could have decided to pull the plug on Confed disarmament. Action Stations had made the point that Confed was more powerful industrially than the Kilrathi - so it is easily conceivable that the armistice could have actually increased Confed's advantage rather than decreasing it.
So, even if we ignore the near-impossibility of turning down the armistice, even if we ignore the fact that nobody could have predicted this was a mistake (really - remember how outraged the Kilrathi were when the plan was first proposed? When your enemy does something that's completely alien to his thinking, it's hard to predict what he's doing)... how can we argue the armistice itself was the wrong decision? Maybe it was - but it's certainly not as clear and obvious as hindight would indicate.