Cabinet FIRST!

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 157880

Sydney:
> IF, when book VII comes out, we don't hear anything further about what
> Draco was doing in HBP-- I mean, nothing material one way or another
> to this debate-- will it then be agreed that actually the basic story
> is as expressed by Narcissa and obliquely by Snape?  By this I mean that:
> 
> -- Voldemort was enraged at Lucius and so approached Draco and sent
> him on a suicide mission;  that is, to kill Dumbledore by whatever
> means he could think of, which in Voldemort's head was a thousand
> times likelier to result in a dead Draco than a dead Dumbledore.  The End.
> 

Pippin:
Um, no. My position will be that Voldemort approached Draco and
sent him on a suicide mission with very specific instructions; that is, 
to fix the cabinets, admitting a force of DE's into Hogwarts who
would serve as backup for Draco's mission to kill Dumbledore.

Because otherwise, as I see it, Draco, who wants glory for
himself, would not have thought that he needed DE backup, or
that they needed to enter the school when Dumbledore was not
there, he would have had plans for whom to invite and what to do 
with them when they arrived, and he would not have been told
to desist from his other attempts to kill Dumbledore.

This does not alter anything that we were told at Spinner's End,
since Voldemort's objective, as Draco has been informed of it, is
to kill Dumbledore, but the objective, as Snape, Bella and 
Narcissa see it, is to punish Draco by making him try to do the 
impossible. 

Snape says straight out that it is unlikely that Draco will complete
his task. Narcissa cries out that then it is intended to for Draco to
fail. Snape says that the Dark Lord is angry and unforgiving, and
Bella chimes in that she would gladly give up her sons and Narcissa
should be proud. No one tries to say that Draco has any chance
of success.

But we are told that Voldemort believes that Dumbledore would
kill Draco when and if Draco made an attempt to kill him. So if 
Voldemort wanted Draco to struggle and suffer and slowly realize 
that he'd been given a suicide mission, instead of getting himself killed
straight off, he had to come up with a way to make sure that
Draco didn't try to kill Dumbledore at once.  Draco's observation
about the cabinets provided the perfect opportunity. Draco 
was told he must fix the cabinet so that he would have
backup for his important mission, and he must learn Occlumency
so that Snape does not find out what he is up to. (If Bella is
Draco's Occlumency teacher then she probably does know about
the cabinets. )

The whole point of this charade was to make Draco and his family suffer.
For the curious, I recommend Erik Larson's The Devil in The White
 City if you want to know what kind of elaborate cat and mouse
games a real life psychopath and serial killer played with 
his victims before killing them off.

This behavior is perfectly in keeping with Voldemort's character as I see
it in the books, and perfectly in keeping with a story arc for Draco
in which he starts out thinking it's an honor to obey Voldemort's
orders and ends up realizing that while he chose to be Voldemort's 
puppet, that's not what he has to be. 

Pippin