Cheney says war critics favor `doing exactly nothing'

US Vice President Dick Cheney charged on Friday that opponents of a US go-it-alone policy on Iraq favored "doing exactly nothing" while the Bush administration was trying to prevent a terror "nightmare."

"Those who declined to support the liberation of Iraq would not deny the evil of Saddam Hussein's regime. They must concede, however, that had their own advice been followed, that regime would rule Iraq today," Cheney said in a speech to the Heritage Foundation think tank.

His speech represented a sharpening counterattack against critics who say President George W. Bush exaggerated the Iraqi threat to justify war and is now mismanaging the occupation. Cheney also rejected criticisms that the US acted without international approval, and challenged a policy of consensus as embodied by the UN Security Council.

"So often, and so conveniently, it amounts to a policy of doing exactly nothing," he said.

In California, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld accused the media of emphasizing the negative in post-war Iraq. He said there was a "mixed picture" which included progress, but US forces were dealing with a "very serious low intensity conflict."

The officials' speeches capped an offensive this week by Bush and key aides to combat falling public support for Bush's Iraq policy.

US soldiers continue to die almost daily in attacks in Iraq, six month's after Saddam's ouster, and the US has failed to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the main reason cited by Bush for launching the war in March.

"I know what is going on there and it is a mixed picture. And the part of the picture that is negative is being emphasized while the part of the picture that is positive is not," Rumsfeld said at the Ronald Rea-gan presidential library west of Los Angeles.

Democrats have labeled the new campaign public relations spin. The campaign would probably have only limited impact, Brookings Institution analyst Michael O'Hanlon said. He noted that a prime-time speech by Bush last month did little to build support and this campaign was a lower-profile move.

Cheney compared the debate over Iraq with the early stages of the Cold War against communism, and said the Iraq war was part of a battle to prevent an "ultimate nightmare" of large-scale global terrorism.

"Instead of losing thousands of lives, we might lose tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of lives in a single day of horror," Cheney said.

"Another criticism we hear is that the US, when its security is threatened, may not act without unanimous international consent. Though often couched in high-sounding terms of unity and cooperation, it is a prescription for perpetual disunity and obstructionism," he said.