Despite World War I lasting 4 years, 3 months, and 14 days, World War II lasting 6 years and 1 day, the Korean War lasting 3 years, 1 month, and 2 days, the Vietnam War lasting 19 years, 5 months, and 29 days, and Iraq lasting 8 years, 8 months, and 28 days, they like to say that I promised 6 weeks to defeat Iran, and actually, from the Military standpoint, it was far faster than that, but I’m not going to let them rush the United States into making a Deal that is not as good as it could have been.

Aside from the fact that the only Iran war deadlines out there are those Trump himself has articulated in his wildly erratic statements about the trajectory of the conflict, he clearly has absorbed some misinformation about the length of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Yes, there was a war between Vietnamese insurgents and France between 1946 and 1954 that ended with formal recognition of the independence of a partitioned Vietnam. North and South Vietnam were engaged in a war from 1956 until 1975. Trump’s timetable seems to treat November 1, 1955, as the day the Vietnam War began. That is actually the day military assistance to South Vietnam had its small and embryonic beginning. If sending military assistance to a foreign government means the United States is “at war,” we’ve been in more wars than you can possibly count just since World War II. His 1975 end date is problematic, too; the U.S. war really ended with a permanent cease-fire on January 27, 1973. The war between Vietnamese combatants didn’t end until 1975.

Pretty much everyone other than Trump dates the beginning of the U.S. war in Vietnam to the 1960s, when military assistance (including the deployment of advisers who were prohibited from engaging in combat) turned into active military operations on land, sea, and air. The key points of departure were the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of August 7, 1964, when Congress authorized retaliation against an alleged North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. naval vessel, and March 8, 1965, when U.S. ground troops were first deployed. Using the latter date as the beginning of the war and the cease-fire as the end, the war lasted 8 years, not 19. That’s a pretty big difference.

Now insofar as the 47th president has a tenuous grasp of American history (which is one reason why he views his own presidency as the summit of national achievement on every front), and for that matter, of facts and figures, why is this particular example of Trump being loose with objective reality significant? Well, for one thing, wars are inherently significant events. For another, a proper accounting of the beginning and end of wars is pretty central to the assessment of Trump’s claims that he is perpetually ending other countries’ wars while avoiding his own.

His distortion of the basic facts of the Vietnam War is a little surprising, since his first big personal accomplishment, other than being born rich, was his five-time evasion of the draft, including four educational deferments and then a medical one for his infamous bone spurs. But it’s also part of a blizzard of untruths and half-truths with which Trump has sought to justify, extend, and repurpose an unpopular war that he has made the centerpiece of his second presidency. In the same Truth Social post in which he extended the Vietnam War by more than a decade to make his own war look like a mere lark, he smeared Democrats as “TRAITORS ALL” for second-guessing him on Iran. It’s precisely the sort of presidential arrogance that kept America sunken in the quagmire of Vietnam for 8, not 19, years.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5858962&forum_id=2#49831162)