Former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo is most famous for his legal memoranda defending torture and virtually unlimited presidential power in the realm of national security. On the Iraq War’s 10th anniversary, however, Yoo has decided to defend another one of his former boss’ unlawful actions, going so far as to argue that Bush administration had made up for harm done to Iraqis by spending money on them.

Yoo, who once said “I was never certain whether the Iraq war made sense as a matter of strategy,” now maintains that “invading Iraq was the best option in light of the information we had then,” and claims that if it weren’t, those who oppose the decision should want to “restore Saddam Hussein’s family and the Baath Party to power in Iraq.” Forced by 200,000 deaths to confront the fact that an extraordinary number of Iraqis were killed, injured, or driven from their homes by our invasion, Yoo suggests that the United States made up for all that by giving the Iraqis money:

Even though the benefits outweighed the costs, that does not mean we simply leave Iraq once we depose the Husseins. The legal system in such situations might still require a benefiting party to compensate a harmed party. In other words, we allow one harm to occur in society because there is a greater good achieved — but then the legal system can intervene afterward to require sharing of the benefits between the plaintiff and defendant.

And isn’t that what we did in Iraq? We spent billions of dollars in Iraq as damages. We did so not because the war was wrong, but because it was right — and we shared the benefits of the war with the Iraqi people by transferring some of it in the form of reconstruction funds.

Yoo fails to note that much of the damage done to Iraqis was a consequence of the Bush administration’s approach to said reconstruction, which Iraq War veteran Jason Fritz calls “a tidal wave of arrogance and stupidity.”

Several other former Bush administration officials share Yoo’s perspective — former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, for example, tweeted that “10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.”

According to Yoo’s post, he is currently “finishing a book on war in the 21st century, where I make the case for preemptive and preventive war.” We’re anxiously awaiting its publication.

“I’m waiting for the architects of those policies to get up and say it didn’t work, but it’s tough to expect that because they never articulated what the hell they were doing.” This is what conservative activist Grover Norquist told the Huffington Post in a piece published today on what the anniversary of the Iraq war means for the Republican Party and foreign policy (spoiler: it’s in disarray).

But Norquist hit on an important point. While a majority of Americans — and indeed the rest of the world — know and have recognized that the Iraq war was a complete debacle that never should have taken place, those who dreamed of taking down Saddam Hussein long before 9/11 and cooked up the intelligence to make it happen either refuse to find any fault in the overall decision to invade Iraq in 2003 or their role in it.

The Daily Beast reported yesterday that some of the Iraq war’s boosters are expressing “few regrets.” The American Enterprise Institute foreign and defense policy studies vice president Danielle Pletka laid all the bad stuff that happened in Iraq on Barack Obama: “Had President Obama chosen not to withdraw from Iraq, it would be a different picture there.” Sure, Ms. Pletka.

And today, the war’s top architects seized the 10-year anniversary to play some historical defense. Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary famous for painting a rosy picture about the war that bore no relation to reality, patted himself on the back for helping liberate Iraq:

10 yrs ago began the long, difficult work of liberating 25 mil Iraqis. All who played a role in history deserve our respect & appreciation.

— Donald Rumsfeld (@RumsfeldOffice) March 19, 2013

How liberating is it for the tens of thousands of Iraqis, including civilians, who were killed as a result of the war? We also wonder if the millions of Iraqis who are now refugees or internally displaced feel liberated. And as NBC News notes today, Iraq “is considered one of the most corrupt in the world, and many of the improvements promised have not materialized. Sectarian tensions regularly explode into open violence.” Liberation, indeed.

Richard Perle — who was chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee during the run-up to the war — wrote in USA Today on Tuesday that it’s “senseless to argue” that because Saddam Hussein didn’t have WMD that “the decision to remove him was wrong.” Actually, Perle himself made that argument In 2009, he saying, “we would not have invaded” if Saddam had no WMD. Nevertheless, Perle says “the decision to remove Saddam was right,” it’s just that “the decision to occupy Iraq was not.”

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Presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R) recently appointed retired General Tommy Franks, who was responsible for some of the greatest failures in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, to be a top military adviser. That’s par for the course for the Romney campaign, which is littered with planners, organizers, and boosters of the Iraq war.

Romney’s support from the Iraq war’s lead planners reaches to the top. Most of the war’s key players who aren’t advising Romney have strongly come out in support him, lending the imprimatur of their foreign policy instincts to his campaign. Here are some of the key endorsements of Romney or his foreign policy:

DICK CHENEY

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “When I think about the kind of individual I want in the Oval Office in that moment of crisis, who has to make those key decisions, some of them life-and-death decisions, decisions as the commander in chief, who has the responsibility for sending our young men and women in harm’s way – that man’s Mitt Romney.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ : “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

DOUGLAS FEITH

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “The Obama administration has gone out of its way to try to deemphasize the ideological part of the problem, and to define the conflict as a conflict that the United States has with an organization and its affiliates, rather than an international movement tied together by an ideology. I think Romney did a pretty good job in making it clear that the problem is broader than Al Qaeda.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “What we did after 9/11 was look broadly at the international terrorist network from which the next attack on the United States might come. And we did not focus narrowly only on the people who were specifically responsible for 9/11.”

DONALD RUMSFELD

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “Terrific, comprehensive speech by Gov. Romney at [the Virginia Military Institute]. He knows America’s role in the world should be as a leader not as a spectator.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “Freedom’s untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.”

CONDOLEEZZA RICE

WHAT SHE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “Our military capability and technological advantage will be safe in Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s hands.”

WHAT SHE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

GEORGE W. BUSH

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT ROMNEY: “I’m for Mitt Romney.”

WHAT HE SAID ABOUT IRAQ: “Mission accomplished.”

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — famous for pushing the United States into a costly war in Iraq based on wildly false intelligence — criticized U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice for being wrong about what caused the recent attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya.

Rice had said that the anti-Islam video that sparked protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was also the catalyst for the Libya attack, an assessment that the Obama administration soon after acknowledged was not correct.

Without any hint of irony, Rumsfeld said last night on Fox News that he was amazed that she could be so wrong, adding, that “has got to be embarrassing”:

RUMSFELD: I watched the presentation, and I thought it was amazing that someone in her position would go on with that degree of certainty, that fast and that authoritatively and be that wrong.

VAN SUSTEREN: Do you think she was perhaps hung out to dry? Because I thought it was unusual that the ambassador of the U.N. would be making that appearance right after that event. I would have expected some other member of the administration, not the ambassador to the U.N.

RUMSFELD: I agree. It would have been more likely that someone from the cabinet or the White House staff or the NSC staff might have said something. It may very well be that she was already scheduled and they just used her. But her — her presentation was demonstrated to be inaccurate within a matter of hours, which has got to be embarrassing.

Watch the clip:

The war in Iraq did come up later in the segment, however, Rumsfeld never expressed any embarrassment about how wrong he was about it. “I think that each country is considerably better off by not having the Taliban in Afghanistan and not having the “butcher of Baghdad,” Saddam Hussein, in Iraq,” he said. “The countries have been given an opportunity to have a freer political system and a freer economic system.”

Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is making waves in recent interviews, displaying a strikingly simplistic understanding of the foreign policy challenges faced by the Obama administration. Last night he did it again in an interview with Fox News’s Greta Van Sustern, during which he declared that Moscow has “Muslim problems” and Russia’s GDP is comparable to Portugal’s:

GRETA VAN SUSTERN: Are we drifting back towards the era of the Cold War?

DONALD RUMSFELD: Oh, I don’t think so. Russia is a totally different thing than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. Russia’s got probably a GDP about the size of Portugal except for their energy. They’ve got problems with their borders. They’ve got Muslim problems with their population. They’ve got alcohol problems. They’ve got a large prison population. They have difficulty with conscripts in their military. They’ve got an outflow of educated people who are going to better places. They have trouble attracting industry outside the energy business because of rule of law issues and corruption. So it is a totally different thing from the Soviet Union.

Watch it:

Indeed, Russia is very different from the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But Rumsfeld’s casual relationship with facts and his willingness to declare Russian Muslims a “problem” is surprising from a former cabinet level official.

George W. Bush made it a point after the 9/11 attacks to specify that “Ours is a war not against a religion, not against the Muslim faith,” but Rumsfeld’s statement about Russia’s “Muslim problems” offers no subtleties about Russia’s challenges with Chechen separatists and buys into the language of Islamophobes who advocate that Western countries are at war with Islam and all Muslims.

When not painting all of Russia’s Muslims as “problems,” Rumsfeld casually dismisses of Russia’s GDP as “about the size of Portugal except for their energy.” An examination of Russia’s economy, as listed in the CIA World Fact Book, shows a GDP of $2.38 trillion, the sixth largest in the world. And Russia’s gas industry reportedly makes up only 25% of Moscow’s current gross domestic product. Even subtracting that 25% (bringing Russia’s GDP down to $1.785 trillion) Russia’s economy is still tenth biggest in the world and far outpaces Portugal’s GDP of $246.9 billion.

Earlier this month, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who served in both the Bush and Obama administrations, said President Obama’s decision to order the raid that killed Osama bin Laden “gutsy,” saying that “people don’t realize” what a tough call it was and not everyone would have made the same decision.

In an interview that aired last night, PBS’s Charlie Rose, noting what Gates had said, asked his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld if he agreed that it was a “gutsy” call. “I don’t,” a defiant Rumsfeld quickly shot back, adding that he would have done the same thing. “It seems to me that it is a 15-minute decision and the first 14 are for coffee,” he said. Rumsfeld then, just like President Bush had done, credited himself for the raid’s success:

RUMSFELD: You can’t imagine the difference in competence and capability and the investment we made and the talent of these people [U.S. special operations forces]. We doubled their authorities, we’ve improved their equipment, we’ve increased their numbers. They have gotten better and better and better, they’re the finest warriors on the face of the earth. [...]

We took the investment that the Obama administration benefited from. The capabilities they have were developed during their predecessors and each President –

ROSE: The predecessor meaning the Bush administration you served?

RUMSFELD: And, yes exactly.

Watch the clip:

The Obama-ordering-the-bin-Laden-raid-was-no-big-deal meme is standard fare for former Bush administration officials. Karl Rove said recently that it wasn’t an “epic achievement” despite the fact that he called it a “very tough decision” just one day after Obama announced the raid.

Rumsfeld says Obama’s decision was a no-brainer. But what would the former defense secretary have recommended? “I would have recommended what the President decided,” he told Rose last night. But would he have? The New York Times reported in 2007 that “[a] secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky.” Which top Bush official called off the raid? Donald Rumsfeld.