Let Jon Steward explain it to you:
On a more serious note, it was clear long before he was elected that Obama was never going to be the great anti-war president we would like him to be. He was smart enough to see that the War on Iraq was a bad idea, but he’s still steeped in the ideology of American exceptionalism and has surrounded himself with hardline foreign policy hawks; Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, undsoweiter.
On domestic policies he may well turn out to be the most leftleaning president of the last thirty years (which isn’t hard) but as post-war history shows, space for “radicalism” at home is often bought through hardline foreign policies. With Obama there will be less of the bull in the chinashop foreign policy practised by Bush and his cronies, there will be more international outreach, more of the sort of stuff Serious Liberals find important, but the fundamentals of America’s foreign policy won’t change. My prediction is that at the end of his term, the US will still have significant forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.