While polls show high popularity for the new Obama administration, the disconnect between the perception and the reality of the administration and its policies remains high as well.

The Obama administration announced a plan to remove U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the end of August 2010. This is a few months later than Obama promised in his election campaign for withdrawal of the 142,000 U.S. troops. Besides the effect of the prolongation of the war on the Iraqi people and U.S. troops, there is also in the same proposal is a plan to leave 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq after 2010. They will be labeled “advisors or trainers” yet they will carry out “targeted counter-terrorism missions.” These 50,000 combat troops (regardless of the label slapped on them) will be used to continue control over Iraqi oil supplies, to threaten Iran and to maintain the U.S. military dictatorship over Iraq.

But the proposal gets more complex: the Obama government intends to remove the 50,000 remaining U.S. troops by the end of 2011. In fact, there is some sort of agreement the Bush administration signed with the Iraqi government to withdraw all U.S. military forces from Iraq by Dec. 31st, 2011. However, Government spokespeople, Democratic and Republican politicians, and corporate media “analysts” have immediately been spinning the finality of this deadline. They make analogies to major concentrations of U.S. troops remaining indefinitely in places like Bosnia and South Korea and how that could also happen in Iraq.

So, instead of the 16 month withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq as promised by Obama in the recent election, the real plans stretch to 19 months, to three years, to a possible indefinite stay.

It gets even worse. It turns out that the Commander in Chief will also be taking some of the current U.S. troops in Iraq, if they do get withdrawn, and instead of going home they will immediately be re-deployed to Afghanistan.

The ruling class in the U.S. is much more unified on the war in Afghanistan than they are on the war in Iraq. While cheering the Obama Administration’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan, the addition of at least 17,000 more U.S. soldiers, the attempts to drag other countries deeper into the conflict on the side of the U.S., the demand from the President for $200 billion more (for just the next year and a half) of our tax money to fund U.S. war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan… many of those same high-level cheer-leaders for war admit there seems to be no real plan for “winning” or even for an “exit strategy” from the intensifying war in Afghanistan.

Many of the most hated policies of the Bush administration continue under Obama but in slightly different forms.

Another example of this is the current U.S. policy to close down the hated Guantanamo Bay prison complex in the U.S. occupied part of Cuba. Soon after taking Office President Obama vowed to close down Guantanamo within a year. Then, in the last week of February, statements from the Obama administration claim there is no evidence of abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo and that the prison complies with the Geneva Conventions and their prohibition of “humiliating and degrading treatment.” This assertion and others like them are strongly denied by prisoners, lawyers, and human rights groups (“New York Times”, 2/24/09). Is the Obama government having second thoughts on closing Guantanomo?

Whether or not they are, perhaps worse is the new Administration continuing and expanding the use of a prison complex at a U.S. Air Force base in Bagram, Afghanistan. On 2/20/09 the Justice Department asserted to a federal judge that “prisoners held at the U.S. Air Force base at Bagram in Afghanistan have no legal rights to challenge their imprisonment.” The base and its prison are “about to undergo a $60 million expansion to provide enough space to house five times as many prisoners as remain at Guantanamo” (“Democracy Now”, 2/23/09).

And for those of us here at home are other examples of Obama’s embrace of Bush “anti-terror” policies: continuing Bush regime opposition to a lawsuit by former, illegal prisoners of the CIA “and to prevent a federal court from reviewing the Bush administration’s warrentless spying program.” (Democracy Now, 2/24/09).

More war for corporate interests, more of our money used for war, more contempt for human rights and a super-sized Guantanomo in remote Afghanistan. As working people who want a decent future, we have to say “No, we can’t” to these and other reactionary policies disguised as something new.