@ArrestJK
Snatching defeat from the jaws of... normality! 🙄

To say anything about victory, or winning at this point would be silly... unless you want to cheer on the rejuvenated Iranian Regime's strategic clean sweep!

All that had been achieved is that they've replaced an old evil at the end of his life anyway (and which internal factions may have been trying to secretly oust), with a younger band of crazier + more evil / ruthless + more hardline fundamentalist jihadis who now have a bloody chip on their shoulder, and will spend the next century or so milking their gains AND simultaneously seeking revenge in a bloodlusty way globally...

Yay... Joy of joys... We now have to look forward to inflation AND suicide bomber exflations for decades to come! Oh... and the axis of evil is now not only emboldened, but also more richly bankrolled:

* Putin AND China just saw both their stocks rise... literally... with their war chests now afforded a new line of funding, AND a morale boost from knowing that they have some good tactical ploys they can use against the Yank's firepower (yeah... their toys are fancier, but their skill in wielding them has sucked since WW2... I don't believe they've actually won *any* war they've got to on recent decades? Right?)

* NK had gotten a good lesson in what to do...

@ArrestJK I doubt he's stable enough to stick to that anyway. They can start things again any time by proxy.

Most likely he quit because they were currently out of munitions of some key type, like the anti-missile missiles (where you spend ten million bucks to shoot down fifty grand over and over), and too many multi-billion dollar planes lost won't be helping with the sale of those planes.

You gotta remember, war's a racket, the war starts because a bunch of very rich people think they're going to make bank on it, and it ends when that proves untrue even for them personally.