By HELENE COOPER

The Obama administration is dithering on a decision about whether to send more troops to Afghanistan, former Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday night, and accused the White House of trying to shift the blame for its inaction on the Bush administration.

In a wide-ranging speech, the former vice president pilloried the Obama administration on a host of issues from President Obama’s engagement with Iran to his decision to shut down the military prison at Guantanamo and his abandonment of the Bush administration’s missile defense plans in Eastern Europe.

But what appeared to vex Mr. Cheney the most was recent remarks by Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, that part of the reason why the Afghanistan review was taking so long was because the White House was asking questions which had never been asked before.

Not true, Mr. Cheney told an audience while accepting the Center for Security Policy’s “Keeper of the Flame” award. The Bush administration did its own review last year, he said, and offered the finding to the Obama transition team.

“In the fall of 2008, fully aware of the need to meet new challenges being posed by the Taliban, we dug into every aspect of Afghanistan policy, assembling a team that repeatedly went into the country, reviewing options and recommendations, and briefing President-elect Obama’s team,” Mr. Cheney said. “They asked us not to announce our findings publicly, and we agreed, giving them the benefit of our work and the benefit of the doubt.”

But on Sunday, Mr. Emanuel told CNN that “when you go though all the analysis, it’s clear that basically we had a war for eight years that was going on, that’s adrift, that we’re beginning at scratch, and just from the starting point, after eight years.”

Bush administration officials were fuming afterward. “They told us not to release our study,” one senior former administration official said in a telephone call.

White House officials have not, so far, disputed that point, acknowledging that, indeed, the Obama transition team received the Bush administration’s Afghanistan review last year. But one White House countered that the Bush administration had “eight years to get” Afghanistan right.

Mr. Cheney did not limit his Wednesday night upbraiding of the president to Afghanistan. He called Mr. Obama’s decision to abandon plans to place a missile defense program in Poland and the Czech Republic “a strategic blunder and a breach of good faith.”

He said Mr. Obama, through his outreach to Iran’s leaders, “has committed America to an Iran strategy that seems to treat engagement as an objective rather than a tactic.”

Mr. Cheney is not happy that Attorney General Eric Holder has ordered an investigation into alleged torture and deaths in Bush interrogations either. “There are policy differences, and then there are affronts that have to be answered about every time without equivocation, and this is one of them,” he said. “We cannot protect this country by putting politics over security, and turning the guns on our own guys.”