“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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Fox News on Friday hosted Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of the war in Iraq, to discuss an alleged “failure of the Obama doctrine in the Middle East,” as host Megyn Kelly described it. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer made the (bogus) charge yesterday on Fox, and Kelly, without any sense of irony, asked Wolfowitz to respond. Krauthammer “is exactly right,” the former Bush administration official said.

Yet Wolfowitz later backhandedly praised Obama’s Middle East policy, lamenting that the successes of the new democracy in Libya (of which President Obama’s Middle East policy helped bring about) don’t get much media attention:

HOST MEGYN KELLY: Your thoughts on Charles Krauthammer’s assertion that this is — what we are witnessing now is the failure of the Obama doctrine in the Middle East.

WOLFOWITZ: I believe that what Charles Krauthammer said is exactly right about the apologetic posture that Obama has taken with the Muslim world, in particular the Arab world. [...]

In Libya it’s very important to emphasize that your viewers may not know because this doesn’t get covered but back in July they had an election. The Libyan people voted freely and fairly for the first time in over forty years and the Muslim Brotherhood came in a distant second and these extremists who seem to be behind the attacks … didn’t even show. ….

Watch the segment:

So things are going relatively well in Libya, but Obama’s Middle East policy is a failure. Got it.

“Our viewers may not know that you were one of the people who believed that we needed to go to war in Iraq,” Kelly told Wolfowitz. Believed? Try: Paul Wolfowitz was a high ranking Bush administration official who pushed this country into a needless war that wound up costing trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, and tens of thousands wounded — not to mention the cost in Iraqi lives and treasure.

And Wolfowitz was the one who rebuked a high ranking U.S. military officer who said (rightly as it turned out) the United States would need hundreds of thousands of troops to go to war in Iraq. “The notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark,” Wolfowitz said in February 2003.

“When weighing [the] possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention,” CAP’s Matt Duss once observed, “there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy.” And Fox hosts Wolfowitz to talk about some fantasy about the failure of the current president’s Middle East doctrine? Very rich indeed.

Speaking to a Fox News audience this weekend, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney dodged a question about whether, knowing what we know now about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in the early 2000s, the U.S. would have invaded in 2003, setting off a costly war that just drew to a close. “At that time, we didn’t have the knowledge that we have now,” said the former Massachusetts governor. “And in the light of that — that belief [that Iraq's programs were active], we took action which was appropriate at the time.”

Today on MSNBC, the presidential hopeful ditched the dodge. Asked by Chuck Todd, he answered that “of course” the U.S. would not have invaded Iraq had intelligence reports indicated that, as we later learned, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq:

ROMNEY: Well, if we knew at the time of our entry into Iraq that there were no weapons of mass destruction — if somehow we had been given that information, why, obviously we would not have gone in.

TODD: You don’t think we would have gone in?

ROMNEY: Well, of course not. The president went in based upon intelligence that they had weapons of mass destruction. Had he known that that was not the case, the U.N. would not have put forward resolutions authorizing this type of action. The president would not have been pursuing that course.

But we did not know that. … [K]nowing what we know now, they did not have weapons of mass destruction; there would have been no effort on the part of our president or others to take military action.

Watch the video:

Compared with his dodge this weekend, Romney here presents a fair accounting of what his position would have been if there were no WMDs in Iraq. (Romney, as ThinkProgress noted on Sunday, supported the push for war at the time.) While some Iraq war supporters — including some in the Bush administration — have made apologia for the botched (or cooked, depending on how you look at it) intelligence in the run up to the war, others have been more honest in their assessments. Take Paul Wolfowitz, a top Bush Defense Department official and Iraq hawk, who said this year: “We did not go to war in Iraq or Afghanistan to promote democracy, but rather to remove regimes that were dangerous to us and to the world.” Romney’s assessment rightfully recognizes the dynamic that was at work during the run-up to the war.

In April 2006, ThinkProgress produced a report titled “The Architects of War: Where Are They Now?” We wrote at the time, “a review of the key planners of the conflict reveals that they have been rewarded — not blamed — for their incompetence.” Referencing our report in July 2007, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote, “To read that summary is to be awed by the comprehensiveness and generosity of the neocon welfare system.”

Flash forward to today, and the answer to our original question of the Iraq war architects — “where are they now?” — can be answered quite simply: They’re on your TV screens, in your radio, and in your newspapers — shamelessly demanding credit for the work they’ve done.

For example, consider former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith. According to the Pentagon Inspector General’s office, Feith delivered a briefing to the White House in 2002 that “undercut the Intelligence Community” and “did draw conclusions that were not fully supported by the available intelligence.” What is he doing now? In an interview with NPR yesterday, he blasted Obama for not properly crediting the “success” of Iraq:

He didn’t say America is more secure. And that’s the kind of statement that could help explain to the American people why we need to persevere and do all the things that he’s pledging to do in the future. … And then he also, in January of 2007, just when the surge was getting underway, proposed legislation that would have ended the war in March of 2008. And had that legislation succeeded, it would have prevented the success that he celebrated in his speech tonight.

Another example: former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, who took blame for allowing President Bush to make the false claim in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to purchase uranium from Africa to build a nuclear weapon. What is he doing now? In an interview with the New York Times, Hadley demanded Bush be given “credit” for Iraq:

“I thought I owed it to the former president that somewhere out there somebody gives him some credit and points out that he’s the one actually that started withdrawing U.S. troops and he’s the one that set up the framework for both a long term relationship with Iraq and a December, 30 2011 end date,” Mr. Hadley said in an interview.

And there’s also former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, who conceded the case for invading Iraq was determined based on what could be easily sold to the public. “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on,” he said. In an op-ed in the New York Times this Monday, Wolfowitz was more magnanimous about sharing “credit” with U.S. soldiers, Iraqi forces, and the Iraqi people. Wolfowitz, who incorrectly predicted Iraq’s reconstruction would be paid for with Iraq’s oil, urged Obama to maintain “a long-term commitment, albeit at greatly reduced cost and risk.”

And on your TV sets, you’ll frequently see Ari Fleischer — the prominent pre-war mouthpiece who said Iraq would “shoulder much of the burden” for reconstruction, who said the Iraqis would “rejoice,” and who claimed that there was no chance “of losing the peace.” On both CNN and MSNBC over the last 24 hours, Fleischer has bemoaned that Bush isn’t being given enough credit for ending the war in Iraq. Watch it: