Is Trump heading to a Pyrrhic victory in Iran?

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.

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?

Read more