Somber as he sounded, the president was nevertheless trying to reassure us. His proffer of hope is that the fulfillment of his campaign promise to withdraw troops from Iraq will permit him to devote greater force to Afghanistan -- and to reinvest in pressing domestic needs. Having squandered a trillion dollars and probably much more over the past seven years, in other words, the government will eventually stanch our bleeding. In Iraq, anyway. 

Today that is what passes for good news.

There was little in the Iraq speech that was exceptional with respect to language or policy, and not much that was exceptionable either. In his description of the current situation in Iraq, however, the president predictably indulged in optimism that is almost certainly unwarranted. He wants to bring American troops home, after all, so he insists that the Iraqis are moving beyond sectarian destruction toward a brighter democratic future. And he preferred not to dwell on the absence of an operational government and functioning services, let alone the dim prospects for ethnic and religious comity.

What the president could not utter, under any circumstances, is an accurate description of the war, the occupation and the ruinous reasoning that led to them.

He could not say, for instance, that the Iraqis are broadly resentful of the U.S. presence in their country and have wished to see us go for years. He could not say what even the most enthusiastic supporters of the Iraq war have been forced to admit: namely that peace in Iraq is tenuous and bloody civil conflict could soon break out again.

He could not say that the predictions of the war’s proponents, both within and outside government, proved to be entirely wrong -- from their claim that weapons of mass destruction would be discovered to their claim that Iraqi oil would pay the costs of the invasion and pacification to their claim that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would result in a wave of democratic reform across the region.

He could not say that U.S. prestige and influence in the Mideast have declined sharply, or that our capacity to criticize human rights violations in other countries -- ruled by thugs like Saddam -- has suffered lasting damage due to our own illegal and brutal mistreatment of detainees in Iraq.

He could not say that the war and occupation resulted in historic levels of corruption, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on ghost projects, phony public relations scams, and crooked Iraqi politicians and American contractors -- not to mention all the money that simply vanished in pallets of cash, without a trace.

He could not say that the misconduct and irresponsibility of the previous administration’s officials, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, former proconsul Paul Bremer, and many others who botched the occupation so lethally, were a disgrace to the United States.

He could not say that imperial overstretch in Iraq inflicted lasting damage on our soldiers and our military infrastructure -- what he called the steel in our ship of state -- and that our standing has been diminished in the eyes of the world. And he could not say that the most lasting consequence of the invasion of Iraq, to date, has been to strengthen Iran, a rogue state that may well acquire the ultimate weapons of mass destruction.

He could not discuss any of those sour realities, aware of them as he must be, at a moment when his party’s majorities on Capitol Hill are threatened by the national atmosphere of defeat and gloom. Instead he fulfilled his duty as commander in chief by copiously praising the troops and noting, correctly, that patriots on both sides of the war debate honor those who served and suffered in Iraq. If he cannot speak the truth about the war, then he should at least be held to his other promise regarding the Iraq debacle: to ensure that America will not, in a final act of dishonesty and dishonor, neglect the soldiers whose bodies and spirits were wounded there.

Though the U.S. commitment in Iraq is winding down, as many up to 50,000 troops will stay as long as the end of next year to help train the country's forces and operate counterterrorism missions. And Obama is sending more troops to Afghanistan, the home base of the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida terrorists, where Americans have been fighting for nearly nine years.

"It is going to be a tough slog," Obama said of Afghanistan in remarks earlier Tuesday to soldiers at Fort Bliss, Texas. "But what I know is that after 9/11, this country was unified in saying we are not going to let something like that happen again." Defense Secretary Robert Gates said success in Afghanistan was possible but "is not inevitable."

Tuesday night, the president was to deliver a 15-20 minute speech in prime time from the Oval Office. His point was to mark Aug. 31, 2010, as the final day the U.S. led the war in Iraq after more than seven years.

"It's not going to be a victory lap," Obama said earlier in the day at Fort Bliss, a post that has lost 51 soldiers in the Iraq war and seen many more severely wounded. "It's not going to be self-congratulatory. There's still a lot of work that we've got to do to make sure that Iraq is an effective partner with us."

In fact, Iraq is in political turmoil, its leaders unable to form a new government long after March elections that left no clear winner. In Baghdad on Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden pressed Iraqi leaders anew to break the impasse. The uncertainty has left an opening for insurgents to pound Iraqi security forces, hardly the conditions the U.S. envisioned for this transition deadline, which Obama announced 18 months ago.

Since the war began, more than 4,400 U.S. troops have been killed and almost 32,000 have been wounded. The war is one of the longest in the nation's history, even as the one in Afghanistan continues.

Obama's big day was defined by what it was -- a turning point, a promise kept -- and by what it was not.

It is not the end of the war. More U.S. troops are likely to die.

All U.S. troops are not expected to leave Iraq until the end of 2011, a final agreement that was secured before Obama took office.

"I am not saying all is, or necessarily will be, well in Iraq," Defense Secretary Gates said Tuesday. He warned that political paralysis and sectarian violence cloud the country's future, but he emphasized that overall violence is at its lowest level since the war began.

Obama has accelerated the end of the U.S. role in Iraq by pulling home nearly 100,000 troops.

The American public has largely moved on. The prevailing worry now is joblessness at home.

Almost forgotten are the intense passions and protests that defined the Iraq debate through much of the past decade. Or that lawmakers of both parties authorized President George W. Bush to go to war.

What emerged was not just a war but a Bush doctrine of pre-emptive force against perceived threats, one that reshaped how the world viewed the United States. In Iraq, the intelligence that made the case for war was faulty; no weapons of mass destruction were ever found.

Saddam Hussein was toppled, and Iraqis now live in greater freedom, but those were not the rationales for war. The aim was, as Bush put it in his own Oval Office address in 2003, "to defend the world from grave danger."

Obama called the war the wrong one, a misguided conflict that inflamed anti-American sentiment. The war he owns is in Afghanistan, and he is escalating it in hopes of securing the peace and getting troops home.

The national focus has turned to that war and to the staggering economy in the U.S. In particular, weeks ahead of a vital congressional election in the U.S., Obama wants Americans to see a linkage between getting out of Iraq and investing more money at home.

A major thrust of Obama's speech was to honor the service of U.S. troops and civilian workers in Iraq. Another was to assure Iraqis that the United States is not abandoning them.

And yet another mission is to remind the country, in Obama's view, about where the true threats to national security lie, including in Afghanistan.

Just 38 percent of people support the war in Afghanistan, according to a new Associated Press-GfK poll, and only 19 percent think things will get better in the next year. On Iraq, unsurprisingly, Obama finds more support in pulling troops home: 68 percent approve of his ending the formal combat mission.

The cost has been financial, too. Congress has allotted more than $1 trillion for both wars.

The Iraq war linked Obama and Bush before the Democrat won the White House, and has ever since. Obama never ran against Bush, but his 2008 campaign against Republican Sen. John McCain often felt that way.

Fittingly, Obama called Bush about Iraq on Tuesday, more than seven years after the former president declared that major combat operations were over. The White House said the call was private and would not say more.

The technical term for these men is "bacha baz," which translates to "boy player" (although "pedophile" works just as well). In popular weekly events, "young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home," writes Brinkley. I could spill several hundred more words relaying fascinating details about this centuries-old cultural phenomenon -- but for our purposes on this here lady blog, the most interesting element of the story is the theory of why and how this practice came to be. Brinkley explains:

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can't even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.

It isn't just that women's bodies are kept under lock and key. Men are also taught that women, what with their monthly curse, are "'unclean' and therefore distasteful." Brinkley writes: "That helps explain why women are hidden away -- and stoned to death if they are perceived to have misbehaved." It also helps explain why boys are dressed up as girls for men's sexual entertainment: it allows for titillation without the female threat of contamination and corruption.

"Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home," Brinkley explains. The man-boy relationships are seen as an exception to the Islamic ban on homosexuality, since there isn't "love" involved. As a local saying goes: "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure." There lies the justification for a cycle of sexual abuse spanning several generations. There are no easy words of wisdom here, but I will say that this seems an especially powerful reminder that women's inequality hurts more than just women.

So he wrote a hilarious editorial about the IJC, which was published by UPI. An excerpt:

For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general's thought processes as abruptly as a computer system's blue screen of death.
[...]
Each day is guided by the "battle rhythm," which is a series of PowerPoint briefings and meetings with PowerPoint presentations. It doesn't matter how inane or useless the briefing or meeting might be. Once it is part of the battle rhythm, it has the persistence of carbon 14.
[...]
The start and culmination of each day is the commander's update assessment. Please ignore the fact that "update assessment" is redundant. Simply saying commander's update doesn't provide the possibility of creating a three-letter acronym. It also doesn't matter that the commander never attends the CUA.

The CUA consists of a series of PowerPoint slides describing the events of the previous 12 hours. Briefers explain each slide by reading from a written statement in a tone not unlike that of a congressman caught in a tryst with an escort. The CUA slides only change when a new commander arrives or the war ends.
[...]
One important task of the IJC is to share information to the ISAF commander, his staff and to all the regional commands. This information is delivered as PowerPoint slides in e-mail at the flow rate of a fire hose. Standard operating procedure is to send everything that you have. Volume is considered the equivalent of quality.

Sellin is not alone in hating PowerPoint! Ackerman writes that a number of high-ranking officers have attacked the slide show program recently, saying it makes the military "stupid" and distorts information. But the guy in charge in Afghanistan is David Petraeus, who loves PowerPoint, a lot.

So Sellin was promptly kicked out of the war for his unauthorized editorializing. According to regulations, officers and enlisted men may not present "written or oral presentations to the media" without clearing it with a public-affairs officer.

Sellin says he tried to tell his superiors about his problems before he wrote the column, but no one listened. Let this be a lesson: If you're going to bitch about mind-numbing, idiotic bureaucracy in the military, it's best to wait until the war is done, then write a scathing satirical novel about it.

In the next few days, Entertainment Weekly voiced its skepticism and Rachel Maddow decried the project's "packaging of the war as entertainment." Beliefnet's John W. Kennedy criticized "Bomb Patrol" for "plac[ing] cameras in places they don't belong for essentially entertainment purposes," apparently overlooking the fact that there's no indication so much as a frame has been shot so far.

August is a slow news month -- per Bush-era Chief of Staff Andrew Card, not a good time to introduce a new product -- and snap judgments are the fuel on which the commentariat runs. But before we attempt to stamp out the attempt to put the Afghan war in front of G4's 6 million viewers, can we ask one question?

Compared to what?

The specter of American troops' travails being served up "Jersey Shore"-style is a repellent one (although I wouldn't mind watching Snooki and the Situation sweat through a few weeks of basic training). But it's not as if "Bomb Patrol," if and when it arrives, will be crowding worthier war-zone programming off the air. At the moment, news networks are more concerned with Americans fighting mosques in Manhattan than the Taliban in Kabul. Kennedy contrasts the prospective show with a "defensible one-time documentary or '60 Minutes' piece," but audiences who are willing to watch war coverage in such traditional forms aren't the problem. There's been no shortage of documentaries, theatrical and televised, about the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. What's missing are people to watch them. That goes double, at least, for G4's core audience of 18- to 34-year-old males, a group who are more likely to wind up serving in the armed forces than watching a documentary about them. Even "The Hurt Locker," which was explicitly designed as an action movie first and a (veiled) critique of the war effort second, was hardly a box-office bonanza.

Maddow's critique, more detailed than most, centered on the train-wreck appeal of some reality programming, only in this case, instead of someone driving drunk or stepping out on their significant other, the stakes are infinitely higher. On Maddow's show, the New York Times' Frank Rich disparaged the "snuff-movie quality" of the proposed series, as if people would eagerly be tuning in each week to see which brave young sailor might get blown to smithereens.

The problem with this analysis is twofold (well, threefold, but we'll sideline the objection that the series in question doesn't even exist yet, conceding that editorials in the conditional tense don't make for riveting viewing). First, not all reality TV is "Jersey Shore," and even otherwise dopey shows have risen to the occasion when circumstances demanded. Second, decrying the packaging of war as entertainment is high-minded and all, but that ship sailed a long time ago, when the night-vision videos of aerial bombardment came back from the first Gulf War, turning missile strikes into Missile Command. Even respectable journalism (whatever that means these days) uses the tools of suspenseful storytelling to hook audiences in, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Without some fresh angle to renew the American public's interest in Afghanistan, it's just another war that has tragically outlived the nation's attention span. That's the reality, on TV and anywhere else.

Sam Adams writes for the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Onion A.V. Club, and the Philadelphia City Paper. Follow him on Twitter at SamuelAAdams or at his blog, Breaking the Line.