President Donald Trump used his Veterans Day address at Arlington National Cemetery on Wednesday, November 11, to defend the war with Iran, insisting the United States did not start it and vowing to finish it completely.
"America did not start a war with Iran," Trump declared in the Memorial Amphitheater, after laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the 73rd National Veterans Day Observance. "Iran has been waging war on America since 1979."
The president argued his military campaign was a response to decades of Iranian hostility rather than the beginning of a new conflict. "We fought back, and we seriously fought back, and we won," he told the crowd, introducing Marine veteran Dale Garner, who survived the 1983 bombing of the U.S. military barracks in Beirut, Lebanon.
"We want to make sure we have a total victory, not a 93% victory," Trump said, adding that it would take Iran 25 years to rebuild and that Tehran would never obtain a nuclear weapon.
The remarks came just days after Trump acknowledged the Iran war helped cost Republicans control of Congress in last week's midterm elections; on Wednesday he conceded Vice President JD Vance was "largely" correct in blaming the conflict for the party's defeat.
Trump also gave a figure for American losses that differs from the Pentagon's own count. At Arlington he said, "We lost 18 beautiful souls." The Pentagon's Defense Casualty Analysis System, updated on the morning Trump spoke and reported by Military.com the same afternoon, lists 23 American service members killed in connection with the war launched on February 28. Two days earlier, on November 9, Trump had said the U.S. had not lost anybody.
Vice President Vance, First Lady Melania Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — one day after the House voted 211–204 to shelve the impeachment articles against him — attended the ceremony.
In his Veterans Day proclamation, Trump said the Department of Veterans Affairs processed a record 3,111,399 disability claims in fiscal 2026, cut its claims backlog by more than 70%, and housed nearly 52,000 homeless veterans last year.
Sources: The Sun, reporting from Arlington with Getty images (Nov 11, 2026); Yahoo News (Nov 11, 2026); Military.com casualty reporting via the Pentagon Defense Casualty Analysis System (Nov 11, 2026); Objective Daily Evening Watch (Nov 11, 2026).
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