Iraqis wonder if more troops will make difference

BAGHDAD, Jan 11 (Reuters) Iraqis weary of death squads and bombs nearly four years after US forces swept into Baghdad asked today what difference 21,500 more US troops would make now under President George W Bush's new plan.

''The government has promised us a lot but nothing has changed,'' said Ali Abdul Razzak, a Baghdad resident in his 20s, as he waited to catch a bus in the morning rush hour. ''The Americans will just come and sit in one place and do nothing.'' Admitting ''mistakes'' in a war that has cost over 3,000 US soldiers' lives and killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, Bush said he was adding 17,500 troops in Baghdad and 4,000 in restive Anbar province to quell spiralling sectarian violence.

Some among the Sunni Arab minority who mistrust the Shi'ite -led government appeared reassured by the US presence. US commanders have made it clear they want Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to crack down on Shi'ite militias, blamed for targeting Sunnis in Baghdad and elsewhere.

''If they withdraw it will not be good for Iraq,'' said Abu Ahmed, a 60-year-old Baghdad man stuck in traffic.

''I will welcome the new strategy if it brings security.'' Yemama Hussein, 25, a teacher in mainly Sunni Arab Falluja west of Baghdad, said it would take time to see the impact. ''But if this strategy is aimed at rooting out the militias ... then things are heading in the right direction.'' Abdul Rahman Mohammed, a 30-year-old civil servant in Falluja, said he saw nothing new in Bush's plans. ''It's the same as previous promises and plans,'' he said.

He said it was wrong to focus on the military when the real problem was politics. ''(We need) a new policy with one condition -- that the Americans don't interfere in making it because the people will see it as an agent of the Americans.'' Mezzael Hussein, president of a sports club in the Shi'ite militia stronghold of Sadr City in Baghdad, was sceptical too.

''Any strategy that comes from a foreign country will not help the Iraqi people. This strategy is like the previous ones.'' Some feared more US troops and a security plan for Baghdad promised by the Iraqi government could even fuel the violence.

''The US troop hike will spark a reaction from the resistance which will increase violence in the streets, and cracking down on militias will also spark a reaction,'' said Bilal Fadhil, 29, an engineer in the southern city of Basra.

''I don't expect that the US forces will hand over security at the end of the year,'' he said.

CRITICISM FROM BOTH SIDES Bush's decision to boost the US troop level in Iraq to around 150,000 drew criticism from political supporters of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose Mehdi Army militias are said by the Pentagon to be the greatest threat to security in Iraq.

''Sending more troops to Iraq is a wrong decision and it is against the will of Iraqis and the American people,'' said Nassar al-Rubaie, spokesman for Sadr's parliamentary group.

''We consider it a dictator's decision to use force towards the Iraqi people, and a non-democratic decision towards the American people because it is against the American majority represented by the Democratic Party, which condemned and disagreed with sending troops to Iraq.'' On the other side of the sectarian divide, an official of Iraq's leading Sunni religious gathering, the Muslim Clerics' Association, said in remarks typically critical of the US presence that sending more troops would not solve problems as long as Sunnis were disenfranchised from the political process.

''The American president is ignoring the dangerous political reality in Iraq,'' Mohammad Bashar al-Fhaidi said.

''Those who are on the ruling side today have taken the path of exclusion, of marginalisation and pursuit of others. There are no links between the Sunnis and those participating in the political process,'' he told Al Arabiya television.

''Bush is a prisoner of his own dreams.'' REUTERS SB VV1623