Whenever George Bush came to Australia he was met by thousands of angry anti-war protesters. Barack Obama deserves the same when he arrives next month.

In the US and around the world, many who oppose the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan welcomed Obama’s victory in 2008. It ignited hope that a different America was possible, that humanity could put the horrors of the Bush era behind it.

But his first year in office has been a systematic betrayal of that hope on almost every front. Far from drawing down the US war machine, Obama has continued or escalated existing conflicts and started new ones.

US troops continue to kill and be killed in Iraq, an occupation that has now gone on nearly twice as long as World War II.

The war in Afghanistan, Obama told us in December, will require another 30,000 troops to carry out a Bush-style “surge” in an attempt to pacify a growing rebellion.

And if that was not enough Obama is sabre rattling about Iran and Yemen, and actively widening the spheres of conflict to new countries like Haiti and Pakistan.

Obama’s response to the disastrous earthquake in Haiti has not been to send aid and open the borders of the US to Haiti’s starving and injured. Instead he has erected a military blockade of the country, and flooded it with US troops who are now acting as an army of occupation.

On February 3, Pakistani press outlets reported on what they called “the biggest attack so far by the American spy planes in the Pakistani tribal areas”. In the attack, at least nine of the unmanned warplanes fired some 18 missiles against the tiny village of Deegan, in Datta Khel, killing at least 17 people and injuring numerous others.

The truth about the US empire is increasingly clear to people in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama’s bullets are just as deadly, his rhetoric about peace and freedom no less hypocritical than those of George Bush. The US establishment and the military machine it commands did not even pause for one second, let alone change course, in acknowledgement of the deep-seated desire for change that put this new administration in the White House.

In the US the mass optimism that greeted Obama’s election victory is a distant memory, replaced by bitterness at a presidency that was supposed to be different, but has followed the same sordid path as the Bush administration, ruling in the interests of Wall Street, whose profits are again soaring as unemployment queues get longer and more people lose their homes. And all the while young soldiers – the dead, the wounded, the traumatised – continue arriving home from the wars, only to see others take their place.

But if bitterness and understanding about the real nature of the Obama presidency is growing around the world, some so-called anti-war figures in Australia seem wilfully oblivious.

Take Greens leader Bob Brown. Chris Johnson reported Brown’s comments on the Obama visit in the Canberra Times on February 6:

“I reckon Australians will be very happy that Obama is in Australia. It’s a good thing,” Brown says.

“He will certainly get a better reception than his predecessor George W. Bush.

“I will be very, very happy to see Obama in Canberra. It’s good to have all heads of state come here to our capital, not least and most of all, in some respects the one from our cross- Pacific relationship.”

This fawning behind the Commander-in-Chief of the US military, a man whose decisions have already ended countless lives around the world, is a disgrace, more so because it comes from a man, Bob Brown, who purports to be an opponent of militarism.

When Obama took office, Socialist Alternative warned that much of the hostility to George Bush from the intelligentsia in the West had had little to do with anti-imperialism, and more to do with hostility to the crude and ineffectual manner in which Bush carried out US imperial policy. What some in the liberal intelligentsia wanted, we argued, was “an emperor who wouldn’t embarrass himself in polite company”. Brown’s grovelling before Obama makes the point perfectly.

But there are plenty in Australia who have begun to see that Obama represents a continuation of, rather than a break with the Bush era of US warmongering. People like Hamish Chitts, former Australian soldier in East Timor and spokesperson for the anti-war veterans group Stand Fast.

“Think Obama is against war? Think again,” he said. “Obama is not a force for progress, he is not a man of peace – from his first day in office over 12 months ago he has firmly placed himself in the camp of the warmongers and war-profiteers.”

Anti-war groups around the country are organising meetings over the next week or so to plan protests during Obama’s visit. The exact dates of his trip and the cities he is visiting have not been released yet. When they are, we need to start organising to meet him with the biggest numbers we can, and with the same slogans the anti-war movement raised against George Bush: Troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan! Freedom for Palestine! No more blood for oil and empire!