"What do you mean, 'There are heroes on both sides'? What are the political commitments of the Confederates?" Who cares? This is what people don't understand about the "politics" of Star Wars. You know exactly what the opening crawl means. This is an epic battle between evenly matched forces, who are both doing some of the coolest Warhammer 40k shit you've ever seen and blowing each other to smithereens. It literally doesn't even matter who's on whose side or why. The battle is just a maelstrom Anakin and Obi-Wan have to make their way through, flying like angels in perfect synchrony, to heroically rescue Satan from the clutches of Robert E. Lee. Then their ship gets ripped in half by an attack from their own forces, and Anakin, the Messiah of the Universe, has to crash-land it through the atmosphere with the aid of his best friend, Errol Flynn, while the evil Emperor and R2-D2 glance at each other pensively, betting it all on their heroes. That's the opening of the film. Let's dispense once and for all with this fiction that George Lucas didn't know what he was doing. He knew EXACTLY what he was doing.