Did Palpatine know that the Republic would win the Clone wars, or did he wait for a victory?

I believe that Palpatine knew the Republic would win. He told Anakin the location of Greivous. Aha! He tried to get the republic to win the war! And, he tried to get a Jedi to convert to the Dark Side.

 

He orchestrated the whole thing. Things fell into place. With his insight, I think he knew it would happen after a certain point. However, I don't think he could have predicted it at the time of TPM. I think it was a long series of short term foresight and intuition that gained him control of the galaxy.

 

Of course he did. The whole thing was set up. And the Republic didn't actually win anything. By the time they "won" they had already become the Empire.

 

As RebelScum77 said, the Republic didn't really win. They had all but become the Galactic Empire, as was his plan from the start.

 

He played both sides of the chess board, setting the Seperatists up for a check mate on Mustafar.

 

Palpatine won everything.

 

The war itself was orchestrated by Sidious and seeing as Palpatine (for the most part) controlled both armies, I'd say it's safe to say he knew the "Republic" would win the war.

 

It may be safe to say Palpatine is the orchestrator & architect of the PT. I would include the OT however there were quite a few things he didn't count on (like Luke, Obi-Wan & Yoda training Luke, Luke's twin siser and Vader tossing his a-- down the reactor).

 

Of course Palpatine knew that the Republic would win. He set everything up so they would. He had the CIS use driods, which were far inferior to the Republic's clones.

Side question though: when Palpatine tells Anakin that 'clone intelligence has discovered the location of General Grevious', did Palpatine play any hand in that at all? Or did the clones legitmately find Grevious themselves?

 

His position on both sides combined to give him power -- Sidious was a covert, shadowy manipulator wielding an army contrived to give the publicly visible Senator/Chancellor Palpatine more and more political power.

It is the wide-spread reach of politics that gave the Sith Lord the absolute power he craved. Thus, it is natural that the covert, shadowy puppet master Sidious would work with the publicly visible Palpatine to pull the strings so that the Chancellor-soon-to-be-Emperor was eventually overwhelmingly victorious.

 

I believe in one of the Clone Wars novels (Labyrinth of Evil?), it discusses how Palpatine/Sidious and Dooku used the Clone Wars to

(a) kill as many Jedi as possible, and

(b) increase Palpatine's hold on power.

The longer the war drags on, the better it is for Palps.

 

Not really. Remember sidious got thrown down the reactor of the death star.