More Attack of the Clones required reading
I know I've given enough fodder recently, but I'd be remiss if I didn't cite Jaquandor for pointing me towards this excellent treatise on that movie. The most illuminating insight is the following exposition (including footnotes) regarding aggression, which addresses one of the most commonly hated changes of the new special edition of A New Hope:

The most obvious way Lucas condemns violence continues to be by showing on the narrative level that aggression is the surest road to defeat. Obi Wan's assault on Jango Fett leaves him hanging below the city in a clear parallel to Luke's defeat in Empire. Attacking Count Dooku at the climax, Obi Wan and Anakin also assure themselves of a terrible loss at his hands. The tide of this battle does not turn until the arrival of Yoda, whose appearance significantly marks Dooku's shift from a defensive to an offensive strategy and in turn triggers his own loss. The pursuit of would-be assassin Zam Wessel provides a more subtle case in point: it succeeds only when the hunters allow themselves to become the hunted. It is a testament to Lucas' creativity that this pattern plays out in even the smallest of subplots without (five films and ten hours into the saga) becoming stale or self-evident.

This is presumably the explanation for the controversial "Greedo edit" in the special edition of the first film. By altering the confrontation between Greedo and Han Solo in A New Hope to show Greedo firing first, Lucas eliminated the inconsistency between this particular conflict and the overarching theme of the film as a whole.

I feel somewhat satisfied and wholly placated by the change now, but still I long for Han Solo to be a badass iconoclast who is at the same time above the whole saga and a clueless yet, in his own way, sage witness to the entire struggle. Alas.