Obama Gets Afghanistan Advice From Mothers Of Fallen Soldiers
Lisa Xiarhos also had a message for President Barack Obama: “Be strong and get the job done,” she recalls telling him. “Dont back down. Send more troops. Support the ones that are there and do whatever you can.”
As Obama reviews U.S. strategy for the war in Afghanistan, meeting with generals, Cabinet secretaries and diplomats, he has received informal advice from those most touched by the eight- year conflict: the parents who sacrificed children, the spouses who lost their mates, and the soldiers who left behind limbs.
On Oct. 8, a group of wounded veterans came to the White House for a game of wheelchair basketball, laying their prosthetics against a fence before rolling onto the concrete court. The president marveled at their mechanical dexterity and then shot three-pointers with them. Twenty-five hours later, he was in the White House Situation Room with his war council to discuss a request for additional troops by General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan.
Obama considers his interaction with disabled veterans and families of the fallen as “sacred,” and leaves the meetings “contemplative” about his overall war strategy, said Matt Flavin, director of the White House Office of Veterans and Wounded Warrior Policy.
The White House doesnt seek publicity for the private meetings, which often dont appear on the presidents public schedule.
Getting Insight
In some cases, parents have urged him to provide the troops with better equipment or more resources. Others are more reticent and shy from political discussion.
“I think he gets insight,” said Flavin, a former Navy intelligence officer who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia. “Some people offer advice, and he listens and he takes on-board the experience.”
None of the encounters has turned confrontational, aides say, and no relatives have asked the president to end the war in Afghanistan.
Still, public support for the Afghan fighting is waning, with 37 percent of Americans saying it was a mistake to send troops to Afghanistan, according to a Gallup poll released in September. In January 2002, only 6 percent thought the war was a mistake.
Former President George W. Bush met with “hundreds of families and hundreds of the wounded,” from Iraq and Afghanistan, said Scott McClellan, Bushs former press secretary.
Some relatives urged him to stop the Iraq war. Some “looked the president in the eye and said, You make sure you finish the job,” McClellan said. The meetings left Bush “emotionally drained” and “certainly had some effect” on his decisions, McClellan said.
Since at least the Civil War, when Abraham Lincoln visited field hospitals surrounding Washington, presidents have sought face-to-face meetings with the soldiers they ordered into combat, said Henry William Brands, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin. At veterans hospitals during World War II, Franklin Roosevelt, partially paralyzed by polio, had a natural bond with those disabled by war, though it didnt alter Roosevelts policies, Brands said.
Theres little indication that Lyndon Johnsons hospital visits influenced his conduct of the Vietnam War, said Brands, who was part of a group of historians who dined with Obama earlier this year.
“Generally, the visits simply confirm presidents determination to finish the job the wounded soldiers have started,” he said.
Presidential Necessity
“These are things that presidents pretty much have to do, or they would seem unspeakably callous,” said Fred Greenstein, a presidential historian at Princeton University in New Jersey. “At the same time, I dont think they are sheer PR.”
Joined by his wife, Michelle, Obama met Lisa and Steven Xiarhos and their three surviving children on Aug. 30 at a Cape Cod military base. Their son, Marine Corporal Nicholas Xiarhos, 21, had been killed by a roadside bomb about five weeks earlier.