Order 66: Carefully Timed Destruction

By Anna Heneise 

Dedicated, with all honor, to Julius Caesar. 

One aspect of Order 66 I find fascinating is the timing. If the only thing Darth Sidious wanted was to kill the Jedi, he could have issued Order 66 a month or a week or even a day into the war and been done with it. But his goal was not only to kill the Jedi, but to destroy them. To destroy the Republic’s faith in them. To destroy the Republic itself, and bring about a new Sith Empire. 

The Clone Wars lasted three and a half years. Within that time Sidious used his armies to economically destabilize the known galaxy, decimate hundreds of planets, and displace billions of people. His political position solidified even as the wider Republic lost faith in their politicians, and, because they were the face of the war effort, the Jedi. He was able to become close enough to Anakin Skywalker to play a role in his Fall and create a new and powerful apprentice for himself. And he was able to turn Order 66 into the worst kind of betrayal; a betrayal of friends. 

It was very intentional on Sidious’ part that the Republic— the Jedi— worked with the clone army, and the Separatists worked with the droid army. There is much speculation over the clones’ personhood by the larger civilian population of the Republic and from the clones themselves, but in the pilot episode for Star Wars: The Clone Wars Yoda indicates that each individual clone has an individual presence in the Force. An individual soul. The Jedi are convinced of the clones’ personhood in some cases before the clones themselves, because of the unique way they interact with the world and with living beings. 

Darth Sidious is also Force Sensitive. Darth Sidious is also implied to have spent the majority of his adult life studying the Jedi, and determining the best way to destroy them. Giving them charge of an army of millions of enslaved young men and sending the lot of them off to fight the bloodiest war the Republic had known since its founding was a brutal and effective tactic on his part. 

The Jedi were faced with the moral quandary of either condoning war and slavery by participating in it or letting the galaxy burn around them. In choosing not to let the galaxy burn, they chose to take responsibility for the clones’ situation, and to bear witness to the suffering and death of the soldiers they led and the civilians they defended. Because of the way they engage with the world through the Force that suffering was magnified. Many Jedi besides Anakin struggled with the Dark over the course of the war. Some Fell. Some returned to the Light, some did not. 

The war took a toll on the Jedi Order both in terms of public perception and through intense, if expected, Order-wide war related trauma. The war for them was a duty, horrible and detested, but finite. When it was over, they hoped to rebuild everything they had lost. For the clones, the hope for victory was a bit more complicated. 

The clones were created for war, and as a people had no concept of a life without it, outside of it, or after it. It wasn’t until almost three years into the war, after Umbara, when Captain Rex finally allowed himself to contemplate what might happen to soldiers with no war to fight. In this new uncertainty regarding their place in the galaxy, the Jedi Order was something certain. 

The Jedi knew the clones to be people and by and large treated them as such. They allowed the soldiers as much freedom and autonomy as they could within the structure and strictures of the GAR. They made efforts to put their officers at ease and to get to know their troops. It wasn’t enough, but it was more than anyone else had ever done. Before the war, the clones had learned of the Jedi through propaganda and at the start of the war they followed the Jedi as their commanding officers, but over three and a half years of fighting side by side from one end of the galaxy to the other, they got to know the Jedi as people. They learned to trust each other. To truly respect each other. The Jedi and the clones became friends. 

Sidious waited as long as he did for Order 66 because he had to wait for the economic crisis to reach its peak, for his political power to reach its peak, for Anakin to Fall, but he also waited until the Jedi and the clones stood united on the cusp of victory. With Grievous dead, the war might be over, and it might be over soon. It’s all there, in Commander Cody and General Kenobi sharing a smile. The war might be over, and even with all the uncertainty a victory for the Republic would be a victory for the clones, because even without the war they would have this friendship. The clones and the Jedi built something unbreakable in the midst of galactic-wide destruction. 

Minutes later, Cody orders his troops to fire on Obi-Wan. 

Sidious waited as long as he did because he knew it would take nothing less than three and a half years of war to break down barriers and build a friendship that could have lasted beyond the dreamed of victory; a friendship that could only be destroyed by betrayal.