political war between russia and the u.s. on the issue. we have people in both key cities. ben weiderman in rome, phil glassco in rome. phil, talk to us about how unusual this is and what we believe the motivations are. reporter: very unusual. chris, certainly a meeting of two different personallies the self style russian strong man and famously humble catholic pope. at the moment they have a lot more in common, especially on syria, where the vatican has publicly backed russia s position in that conflict, even in response to the use of chemical weapons by the syrian government. russia likes that, because it gives their position much more moral authority. both parties are also concerned about the site of christian minorities in syria across the most and navg as well. more broadly, russia and the vatican have never been that close, russia is close to the orthodox church. they and the vatican have long
two months, possibly. we have some problems right now that are direct results of the controversies. this is horrible. the bodies of four soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice in avg will arrive at dover air force base and the family of sergeant hawkens and the others will have to pay for their own way to delaware. and pay out of their own pockets for their funerals. that s because the pentagon said it s unable to pay out debt betts benefits because of a shutdown. that means any servicemen member killed sense october 1st will not receive the automatic $100,000 usually paid to families within 36 hours of a death for found ral costs. it s an crash that has led to outrage on both side of the aisle. it s shameful and embefore a rasing. america could fail the families of our fallen heros.
we told the afghan people we were going to be there in 2014. i don t think we can pull out until 2014. the reality is the resources of the congress that the military will keep us there. iraq, we can get out any time we want to. avg is much longer. president obama made a strong stand of getting out of the war in iraq. we re pretty far along in iraq. he did the surge that was helpful in a more stable country. we didn t have to go to afghanistan. he did make the commitment. we have men and women on the ground fighting the war. we have committed to these people and committed to our