Colin Sheridan: US military may well overwhelm Iran but any victory will be Pyrrhic as history has shown us

US president Donald Trump and Israel's  Benjamin Netanyahu may have made a big miscalculation in attacking Iran by thinking that force alone can defeat belief. 

Mourners attend the funeral procession for senior Iranian military officials and some civilians killed during the US-Israel campaign, in Tehran, Iran. PictureAP Photo/Vahid Salemi

There is a story, older than the Republic and more enduring than most empires, about a king who won himself into ruin. Pyrrhus of Epirus, campaigning against Rome in the third century before Christ, defeated the legions at Asculum and Heraclea. Victories, both. Tactical, undeniable, written in the language of the sword and the shield. But they cost him dearly — so dearly that, surveying the carnage, he is said to have remarked that one more such victory would undo him entirely.

It is from this lament we inherit the phrase “Pyrrhic victory,” a term often misused to describe any hollow win, any bittersweet triumph. But Pyrrhus was not speaking of bitterness. He was speaking of arithmetic. Of exchange, and of a ledger so grotesquely unbalanced that victory itself became indistinguishable from defeat.