US plans to deploy thousands of additional troops to Iraq are ''too little, too late'', experts warned today.
As US President George Bush set out his latest strategy to quell the spiralling sectarian violence, there was little optimism among military and foreign affairs specialists that it would work.
Under the latest White House plan, an extra 21,500 US troops are being sent to the capital Baghdad, and to Anbar province, which has been the centre of the Sunni insurgency.
The deployment will take the total number of American troops in the country to 153,000.
However Dr Gareth Stansfield, a fellow of the Chatham House international affairs think tank, and associate professor at Exeter University, said it would need a far larger force, of about 500,000, to stabilise the country.
He said that it was ''quite ridiculous'' to think that such a small reinforcement could turn around the situation, and warned that it could exacerbate the problems.
''I don't think it will work. I think it is far too little, far too late. If anything, it will probably make the situation even worse than it is now,'' he said.
''The Americans do act as a magnet for the insurgents and the Shia militias. If you do have a larger presence on the streets of Baghdad it just furthers that dynamic.
''I think we are facing a civil war of formidable proportions.''
Dr Toby Dodge, an Iraq specialist at Queen Mary's University, London, agreed that a force of 400,000 to 500,000 would be needed to to re-establish security.
He warned that US plans to ''clear out'' the insurgents from Baghdad district by district were unlikely to succeed, because the Iraqi security forces lacked the capacity to prevent them returning once the Americans had gone.
''The problem in Iraq is not only the lack of American troops, it is the complete collapse of the state,'' he said.
''They are clearing out, but they can't hold and they can't build because the Iraqi government hasn't got the capacity to do it.''
Dr Michael Williams, the head of the transatlantic programme at the Royal United Services Institute military think tank, said that US troops were not trained for the kind of counter-insurgency warfare they were facing in Iraq.
American tactics, knocking down doors and roughly searching the occupants, simply alienated the local population they needed to win over, he said. Instead they needed to show greater ''cultural understanding''.
''Sending 20,000 conventional troops into a very unconventional situation will not fix the situation,'' he said.
''When you have a large conventional army, they are trained to fight in a certain way with certain clear-cut rules.
''When you are fighting a counter-insurgency campaign it is about cultural understanding. There is not enough cultural maturity. There is a very embedded institutional culture which is very difficult to change.
''It is not the kind of war the US is prepared to fight.''
He said that the Americans were now paying the price for not sending a larger force to secure the country immediately after the invasion in 2003.
''If you had put out the fire when it was small, a bucket of water would have worked. But now the whole house has gone up in flames, a small hose isn't going to be enough,'' he said.
American strategy needed to be far more broadly based, which a much greater emphasis on political, economic and social measures, rather than simply looking for a military solution.
The danger now was that organisations pursuing an ''al Qaida ideology'' would succeed in fomenting a much wider regional conflict.
Dr Dodge said that the situation was now beyond the US to deal with alone. He said that Washington needed to involve the United Nations as well as major powers like Russia and France, and Iraq's neighbours.
''Iraq is in the midst of a civil war. This problem is far too big for America,'' he said.
