Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. Hillary Clinton are going at it over Clinton’s request for briefings on contingency plans for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

Cheney, on the “Larry King Show” said: “What we don’t do is we don’t get into the business of sharing operational plans — we never have — with the Congress.”

He said he agreed with a letter sent to Clinton from an undersecretary of defense, Eric Edelman.

“Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq, much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam,” Edelman wrote.

Clinton responded today to Cheney: “I have never requested operational plans,” she wrote. “My request — which has been honored — is to be briefed on redeployment planning to protect the safety of our troops in what will be a dangerous and complicated series of events.”

And she said she was writing to President Bush asking that he set the record straight about his administration’s position on congressional oversight of the war.

“After four years of mismanagement and mistakes by the Bush Administration in Iraq, I believe it is not only important, but imperative that Congress actively oversee the administration’s Iraq policy,” she wrote.

Read the letters “here.”:http://clinton.senate.gov/features/gates.cfm