from 21st Century Wire:
Far worse than simply paying a high price for ‘a win’, ancient King Pyrrhus’s problem was that every victory shifted the balance against him.
President Donald Trump has claimed victory in the war in Iran even before the conflict is over. But despite the killing of the country’s leader and seriously degration of its military, there is an argument being made that the Islamic Republic has emerged all the stronger for having simply survived.
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Indeed, a phrase that has repeatedly cropped up as the US has sunk more and more military hardware and credibility into Operation Epic Fury is “Pyrrhic victory.”
That term also shows up in Iraq War retrospectives, in postmortems of US operations in Libya and in just about every serious attempt to make sense of the past two decades of Western intervention in the Middle East.
But what exactly is a Pyrrhic victory? And is the US really heading toward one in Iran?
1 king, 2 battles and a rueful remark
Most people use the phrase “Pyrrhic victory” to mean a win that costs more than it was worth to obtain it. That’s close enough – but it leaves out a crucial part of the story that makes the concept worth using.
Let’s go back to the beginning. In 280 BCE, Pyrrhus, the king of the ancient Greek kingdom Epirus, crossed into what is now southern Italy to fight Rome. He won major battles at Heraclea and then again at Asculum the following year.
But both victories hurt Pyrrhus. His officer corps was getting chewed up, and his best troops came from a small kingdom far from the fighting. They could not be replaced on anything like Rome’s scale.
IMAGE: Hannibal’s elephants at the Battle of Zama (Image Source: Wikipedia)
After Asculum, he is said to have uttered, “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.” Plutarch wrote it down for posterity, and the line outlived everything else known about the campaign.
The problem wasn’t that Pyrrhus paid a high price for victory. Rather, it was that every victory shifted the balance against him.
A war can be costly without being “Pyrrhic.” If you come out of a battle clearly stronger than the opponent, then – whatever the bill – something real was gained. The Pyrrhic case is when the side that claims victory is, in fact, in a weaker position than when the fighting started.
From Baghdad to Tripoli…
So how does that all relate to US conflicts in the 21st century?
Iraq in 2003 is the obvious starting point. US and coalition forces dismantled Saddam Hussein’s regime in just three weeks. On its own terms, the operation worked. But it also collapsed the Iraqi state in the process: army gone, ministries hollowed out and police absent.
What followed, in broad terms, was insurgency, sectarian war and then the rise of the Islamic State group.
Saddam’s Iraq also functioned as one of the main checks on Iranian power in the Persian Gulf – not by design, and not in any cooperative sense, but as a rival that kept Tehran boxed in. Removing Saddam cleared space for Iran to exert regional influence not enjoyed since 1979.
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