MUNICH, Feb 6: US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Friday he had no regrets about his explosive "Old Europe and New Europe" comment before the Iraq invasion that drew a storm of criticism from the continent.

"I'm too old to have regrets. No, I don't regret it," he said in an interview with European journalists. "Life is going to go on, people are going to sort through" differences.

He said the comments on Europe, made to reporters in Washington in last year's run-up to the March US-led invasion of Iraq, were an attempt to illustrate that Nato was expanding eastward and that Europe was changing.

"And instead of saying 'Old Nato and new Nato', I said 'Old Europe and New Europe' - and I ended up becoming a folk hero for all the wrong reasons," said Rumsfeld, who was in Munich to attend a meeting of Nato defence ministers.

He made the original comments at Washington's Foreign Press Center at a time when a number of Western European allies - especially France and Germany - were expressing open, bitter opposition to United States threats to invade Iraq. -Reuters