Donald Trump has casually claimed that America did not start the war with Iran, which has killed thousands of people and upended oil prices.
The US President made the remark today at the national Veterans Day ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia.
Speaking in the cemetery’s Memorial Amphitheater, Trump said: ‘America did not start a war with Iran.
‘Iran has been waging war in America since 1979. This should have been taken care of a long time ago.
‘It was about time somebody fought back. All of us fought back. We fought back, and we seriously fought back, and we won. Just a question of when we want to end it.
‘We want to make sure we have a total victory, not a 93% victory.’
A clip of Trump insisting he did not start the war was shared by the White House’s Rapid Response 47 X account and affiliate, Trump War Room.
Trump also said the war will be over ‘soon’, though he gave no clear date.
He added that he ‘began operations’ against Iran ‘seven months ago, of which only a few weeks were active hard fighting’.
‘We lost 18 beautiful souls,’ the president added, referring to the soldiers killed in the Iran War.
‘It’ll take them 25 years to rebuild back what we have destroyed, and hopefully we won’t have to destroy any more of that country,’ he added.
How the US started a war with Iran
The US and Israel are said to have plotted a military assault in secret for weeks amid efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear program.
The nations started a war with Iran on February 28 by launching joint strikes on a government compound in Tehran, the Iranian capital city.
The blasts killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation’s supreme leader for almost four decades, as well as top military and intelligence officials.
At least 175 people, most of them children, were killed during a US-ordered strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh school in the southern town of Minab.
Iran retaliated for the US-Israeli bombing campaign by firing missiles and drones at Israel and nearby US military bases.
After months of attacks and counterattacks, Trump said ‘a whole civilisation will die tonight’ if Iran did not land on a ceasefire deal in April.
Later that day, he announced a two-week ceasefire between the US and Iran. Israel, however, continued to pummel nearby Lebanon, as the conflict tore through the Middle East.
The focus in recent months has been on reopening the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway along Iran’s southern coast used by oil tankers.
The strait has effectively been closed since February and won’t reopen until the US ‘corrects its behavior’, Iranian officials said in August.
The US and Israeli militaries were gearing up for a new round of strikes on Iran when the American mid-term elections happened earlier this month.
Trump’s Republican Party suffered a crushing defeat, losing both the lower and upper chambers of Congress, the main legislative body.
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