The following contains spoilers from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
While watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it’s impossible to avoid a sense of déjà vu. The film opens with a resistance operative hiding an important message in a droid shortly before he is captured by servants of the Dark Side. The droid is found by a seemingly insignificant individual on a desert planet who turns out to be a gifted Force-sensitive. There’s even a planet-killing weapon with an Achilles heel that gives urgency to the film’s central conflict. For much of the movie, Star Wars fans could be forgiven if they think that they’ve accidentally stepped into a showing of A New Hope.
And yet, behind the impossible-to-ignore sameness between the first and the most recent Star Wars films is an astute commentary on the aftermath of political upheaval. Indeed, it is a shame that former President George W. Bush did not see it before he ordered American troops into Iraq.
What’s so striking about the world of The Force Awakens is that, three decades after the Rebellion’s triumphant victory over the Empire at the Battle of Endor, little has changed. The superweapon that animates much of the movie’s plot is wielded by the First Order, a military regime that, like the Empire, is led by a master of the Dark Side of the Force who employs an apprentice as his agent. This new regime even maintains an army of stormtroppers clad in the familiar white armor. The Rebellion, meanwhile, has morphed into an entity known as the Resistance, which wages asymmetric warfare against the far more powerful First Order. It’s led by a familiar figure, Leia Organa, who is often simply referred to as “The General.”
Meanwhile, at the fringes of the movie’s story is a third power known as the New Republic, which is allied with the Resistance — although this third power exists largely to provide a target for the aforementioned superweapon.
The Force Awakens does not offer much detail on how the hopefulness from the end of Return of the Jedi gave way to the familiar power struggle that drives this latest film, but its not hard to guess why Sheev Palpatine’s death did not bring about a new birth of freedom in a galaxy far, far away. The Rebellion was an insurgency capable of waging guerrilla warfare and of conducting coordinated attacks on a single, strategic target. Its two greatest victories ended in the destruction of the two Death Stars. As a bonus, each of these victories included a high-level political assassination — Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin at the Battle of Yavin, and Emperor Palpatine himself at Endor.
Despite his political brilliance and his command of the Dark Side of the Force, Palpatine relied on a web of councilors, moffs, grand viziers, generals and admirals to administer the planets under his rule.
The Rebellion, however, had nothing approaching the networks and infrastructure needed to maintain control of a sprawling interstellar empire. Despite his political brilliance and his command of the Dark Side of the Force, Palpatine relied on a web of councilors, moffs, grand viziers, generals and admirals to administer the planets under his rule. There are simply too many decisions to make, too much intelligence to process, and too many commands to be issued for one man, even a Dark Lord of the Sith, to govern an empire without a substantial bureaucracy in place.
The imperial planets, moreover, were accustomed to some amount of home rule. Though the Galactic Senate wielded significant power in the republican form of government that proceeded Palpatine’s rule, the Galactic Republic still utilized a federalist system that left many internal decisions to planetary governments. As queen of Naboo in The Phantom Menace, Padmé Amidala wielded executive power quite independently of the Senate. Some remnant of home rule remained, moreover, under much of Palpatine’s rule. As a member of the royal family of Alderaan, Leia retained the title of princess. When the captured Leia is brought to Darth Vader for questioning at the beginning of A New Hope, she insists that she should be immune to imperial harassment because she is “a member of the Imperial Senate on a diplomatic mission to Alderaan.” Such a statement would make no sense unless Alderaan retained some residual sovereignty despite its subjugation to the Empire. (Although the Death Star’s subsequent destruction of Alderaan does suggest that Palpatine took a narrow view of home rule during the final years of his reign.)
So when the Empire lost the strong leader that held it together, there would have been no shortage of rivals who could plausibly assert the right to continue as rulers. Regional moffs could have attempted to consolidate control over the planets they administer while imperial councilors were jockeying to succeed the suddenly fallen emperor. Generals and admirals might have aligned with more powerful figures, or they may have attempted to become planetary warlords themselves. Meanwhile, local leaders could have claimed a mandate to secede from the empire and rule over their own independent planets. By the time of The Force Awakens, this chaos appears to have sorted into two major powers — the First Order and the New Republic — but the one outcome that was never likely was that the Rebellion would get to determine what kind of governance emerged from Palpatine’s fall. They were just one faction among many, even if they did happen to be present at the moment of the Empire’s decapitation.
Which brings me to Iraq.
Unlike the Galactic Empire, Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist regime was not toppled by a local insurgency, it was toppled by an invasion from a vastly superior military force. That force, the United States, could at least attempt to tamp down some of the chaos that emerged after Hussein was deposed — although with only limited success. The emergence of ISIS in Iraq, despite the fact that the terrorist group is gradually losing ground, is a testament to America’s limited ability to shape Iraq’s destiny.
In fairness, some members of the Bush administration understood the consequences of decapitating a nation’s government. “If you break a government,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell warned, “if you cause it to come down, by invading or other means, remember that you are now the government. You have a responsibility to take care of the people of that country.”
But Powell’s warnings were not headed by much of the administration. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld predicted that the Iraq War “could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.” Vice President Dick Cheney predicted that the war would take “weeks rather than months.” Former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz admitted three years after the invasion that “what surprised all of us is the war has gone on a lot longer than we thought.” And then there was that “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” banner.
The naiveté that drove these men was summarized by President Bush himself in a 2003 speech to the American Enterprise Institute. The American invasion of Iraq, Bush predicted, will “contribute greatly to the long term safety and stability of our world.” With American military forces guiding its path, Iraq would move “toward democracy and living in freedom.” And President Bush saw little downside for the Iraqi people in our invasion. “Any future the Iraqi people choose for themselves,” he told the audience at the conservative think tank, “will be better than the nightmare world that Saddam Hussein has chosen for them.”
The dominant view in the Bush administration, in other words, was that they could achieve a liberal democracy in Iraq through the force of their own invasion. And much of the administration believed that this invasion would be brief, lasting only a few months at most.
Thus, the sad reality is that the writers of Star Wars: The Force Awakens understood more about how regime change can go wrong than the former President of the United States. Such change is as likely to destabilize a region as it is to “contribute greatly to the long term safety and stability of our world,” and there is no guarantee that the government that emerges from that instability will be democratic — or that it will be able to control the entire region the toppled regime once governed.