Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. had a blunt response Friday to the latest broadsides from former Vice President Dick Cheney: "Who cares?"In the latest exchange between old and new administrations, Mr. Biden rebuffed his predecessor's criticism about President Obama's handling of Afghanistan as "absolutely wrong." And Mr. Biden rejected the last review of the war conducted by the White House under former President George W. Bush and Mr. Cheney as "irrelevant."
The dismissive reply came during in an interview here at the end of Mr. Biden's three-day swing through Eastern Europe and underscored the weariness in the current White House with Mr. Cheney's periodic assaults on the new team's record. At the same time, advisers to President Obama and Mr. Biden consider the former vice president a useful public foil and have not shied away from escalating the debate by taking him on directly.
At the heart of the dispute is a fundamental disagreement on national security, from how to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan to how to protect Americans at home from possible terrorist attacks. In a speech in Washington this week, Mr. Cheney complained that Mr. Obama was "dithering" in deciding whether to send more troops to Afghanistan and had committed a "strategic blunder" in scrapping the last administration's missile defense plan in Eastern Europe.
Mr. Biden spent much of this week in Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic assuring leaders in the region that cancellation of Mr. Bush's anti-missile shield in favor of a more mobile replacement was not a concession to Russia, as Mr. Cheney and others contended. The vice president secured an agreement with the Czech Republic on Friday to participate in the new missile defense system, just as he did with Poland earlier in the week.
Asked about Mr. Cheney's criticism during a half-hour interview at the American ambassador's residence here, Mr. Biden responded indirectly at first, saying leaders in the region now agree that the Obama plan will be more effective. "They believe that the new architecture is better," the vice president said.
But as he warmed to the discussion, he became sharper in his rebuttals of Mr. Cheney. "I think that is absolutely wrong," he said of the dithering charge. "I think what the administration is doing is exactly what we said it would do. And what I think it warrants doing. And that is making an informed judgment based upon circumstances that have changed."
Mr. Biden shrugged off Mr. Cheney's point that the old administration left behind a review of Afghanistan.
"Who cares what -- " he said, and then stopped himself to find another way to put it. ("I can see the headline now," said the famously free-wheeling vice president. "I'm getting better, guys.")
But he went on to dismiss the Bush-Cheney review as inadequate. "That's why the president asked me to get in the plane in January and go to Afghanistan," Mr. Biden said. "I came back with a different review."
Moreover, he said, the Bush-Cheney review is now dated. "A whole lot has changed in the last year," Mr. Biden said. "Let's assume they left us a review that was absolutely correct. Is that review relevant and totally applicable to today in light of the changes that have taken place in the region, in Afghanistan itself? So I think that is sort of irrelevant. Not sort of -- I think it's irrelevant."
The interview was one of the few times Mr. Biden has talked about Afghanistan publicly recently as the president rethinks his strategy and considers Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's request for about 40,000 more troops. The vice president has been a forceful skeptic of General McChrystal's request and an advocate for keeping troop levels roughly the same while focusing attention on hunting down Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
Mr. Biden said Mr. Obama has lived up to a pre-election pledge to take his vice president's views seriously and added that he would not be upset if the president rejects them at the end of the Afghanistan policy review. "He has sought my opinion not generically but in detail," Mr. Biden said. "And if he reaches a different conclusion than I do, that's okay. He's the president."