It’s become a standard political tactic to personalize global political issues by depicting them in terms of their impact on sympathetic individuals. That’s the tactic that Congressman Ted Poe took in this week’s debate about whether to bring American soldiers home from Afghanistan by the end of this year, or to continue the open-ended war that’s been going on there for almost nine years now.

Poe used the death of an American soldier to support his argument that more American soldiers should be kept in harm’s way. He talked about dead Army Specialist Jarrett Griemel, saying, “Last June, Jarrett was killed at the age of 20 years in Afghanistan. This is his photograph. He is on this board–the board with 27 other Texans from our congressional district area. He is the latest to have been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan as a volunteer to go overseas and protect the rest of us in time of war. He believed in protecting our country. He believed in it so much he was willing to leave his wife and go halfway around the world to fight an enemy on the enemy’s own turf. And he believed in it so much that he was willing to give his life for the rest of us. So if we pass this resolution, what message do we send to Jarrett’s family or Jarrett’s young bride–that his sacrifice just wasn’t enough? That it was all for naught?”

Ted Poe’s implicit assertion is that decisions about war should be made according to the personal feelings of the families of soldiers. Whatever makes them happy should become the military policy of the United States, according to the Poe model of war.

That’s a questionable approach to building military policy, given that 20 year-old American soldiers like Jarrett Griemel, while they may have personal courage, do not tend to be especially informed about the larger issues that drive the USA’s decision to go to war and stay at war. In his response to Poe’s use of Jarrett Griemel, Congressman Bob Filner could have responded at that level. Instead, for rhetorical purposes, Filner allowed for Poe’s fundamental assertion, and argued against Poe’s support of continuing the war in Afghanistan on Poe’s own terms.

Filner’s counterargument was this essentially this: It’s a mistake to presume that American soldiers are hoping for a war to continue. After all, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers are suffering from mental agony as a result of having been at war. They’ve got post traumatic stress disorder that’s characterized by a terror that the battle is continuing. Do they really all want the war to go on?

Congressman Filner had a very clear idea of what to tell the families of American soldiers: “We’ve got hundreds of thousands of people with post-traumatic stress disorder, hundreds of thousands with traumatic brain injury, all of whom were undiagnosed when they left the battle front. The military doesn’t want to know about these injuries. They don’t want to tell the American people about these injuries. This kind of war produces those injuries. I didn’t hear that from Mr. Poe. What do we tell the mom? We tell the mom that we shouldn’t be sending her child there because of the nature of the war.”