WASHINGTON - Former President Bill Clinton got in the current president’s face yesterday, slamming the Bush administration for linking the London bomb plot and the war on terror to the war in Iraq.

"The Republicans should be very careful in trying to play politics with this London airport thing because they’re going to have a hard time with the facts," Clinton said in an interview.

"I don’t think the foiling of that London bomb plot has any bearing on our Iraq policy," he said.

Clinton’s broadside, delivered on ABC’s "Good Morning America," came as President George W. Bush spent his second day in the wake of the defused British terror plot holding high-profile national security meetings.

Clinton, who never mentioned Bush by name, suggested the administration’s claims that the British plot looks like the work of al-Qaida reveals a flaw in its strategy.

"They seem to be anxious to tie it to al-Qaida," he said. "If that’s true, how come we’ve got seven times as many troops in Iraq as in Afghanistan? Why have we imperiled President" Hamid "Karzai’s rule and allowed the Taliban to come back into the southern part of Afghanistan?"

He also said the administration and GOP leaders in Congress had opposed tighter security on cargo containers at ports and airports.

White House spokesman Tony Snow said there had been "considerable efforts" to ensure container safety.

"So President Clinton, I know, is sort of committing some politics here and accusing Republicans in so doing," Snow said. "I think in the same position he’d be looking at the same options."

The former president also said Democrats who had voted to give Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq - including his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. - had hoped the threat of war would force former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to comply with U.N. inspections. But the Bush administration went to war before the United Nations’ work was complete, he said.