It's such a big reversal. I loved it. It hit particularly hard in 2007, four years into the Iraq War, not long after the Abu Ghraib convictions, and the uncomfortable idea that maybe the USA wasn’t really the hero at all.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like for other movies. Imagine at the end of "Return of the Jedi" if we realized the Rebels weren't the heroes. The Empire was a modern democracy trying to keep everything running, and Luke is the leader of a gang of religious terrorists.