Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed suggestions that blunders may have hurt the Bush administration’s credibility on Iraq.

In an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, conducted a day after the State of the Union address, Cheney was asked to respond to some Republicans who “are now seriously questioning your credibility, because of the blunders and the failures.”

To that, the V.P. answered:

“Wolf, Wolf, I simply don’t accept the premise of your question. I just think it’s hogwash.”

Cheney said the Bush administration is committed to moving ahead with its plan to send additional troops to Baghdad, even if Congress passes its non-binding resolution in opposition.

“It won’t stop us,” he said, echoing Bush’s remarks that the approval of Congress is not needed. “And it would be, I think, detrimental from the standpoint of the troops.”

If the U.S. were to pull out of Iraq, Cheney believes the U.S. would simply validate the terrorists’ strategy. He says Americans will stay to complete the task, and show we have the stomach for the fight. Not doing that would be the biggest threat, he says.

“The notion that somehow the effort hasn’t been worth it, or that we shouldn’t go ahead and complete the task, is just dead wrong,” he added.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said Thursday that Cheney’s Iraq war policy is out of touch with reality.

“To have Vice President Cheney suggest we have had a series of enormous successes in Iraq is delusional. I don’t understand how he can continue to say those things when the president calls them a slow failure,” Durbin said.

Cheney said the ouster of Saddam Hussein was the right move.

“The world is much safer today because of it,” he said. “There have been three national elections in Iraq. There’s a democracy established there, a constitution, a new democratically elected government. Saddam has been brought to justice and executed, his sons are dead, his government is gone. And the world is better off for it.”

Still, Cheney acknowledged “ongoing problems” in Iraq, where an insurgency is blamed for dozens of Iraqi deaths per day and there have been more than 3,000 U.S. military fatalities over the course of the nearly four-year-old war.

“There’s problems - ongoing problems. But we have, in fact, accomplished our objectives of getting rid of the old regime, and there is a new regime in place that’s been there for less than a year, far too soon for you guys to write them off.”

Asked to describe the biggest mistake made by George W. Bush and the U.S. war planners, Cheney said, they underestimated the extent to which 30 years of Saddam’s rule debilitated the population, pounding it into submissiveness.

“It’s very hard for [Iraqi citizens] to stand up and take responsibility, in part because anybody who’s done that in the past have had their heads chopped off,” he said.

Asked about criticism from a conservative group about the pregnancy of his openly gay daughter, Mary Cheney, who is in a long-term relationship with a woman, the Vice President expressed irritation.

“I’m delighted I’m about to have a sixth grandchild, Wolf, and obviously I think the world of both my daughters and all of my grandchildren. And I think, frankly, you’re out of line with that question,” he said.

And Cheney carefully avoided talk about the 2008 presidential race beyond expressing outright opposition to Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) “because she’s a Democrat” and saying he and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) “agree on many things and disagree on others.”

While refusing otherwise to speculate on the 2008 campaign, Cheney said Clinton will not be president, and even if she were to win, she wouldn’t make a good chief executive.

“I don’t agree with her philosophically and from a policy standpoint,” the vice president said.

McCain, like Clinton a likely presidential aspirant, has been a consistent war supporter since the controversial 2003 invasion of Iraq.

However, he said last week that Bush has “been very badly served by both the vice president and, most of all, [former] Secretary of Defense” Donald Rumsfeld.