“We know where they [the WMDs] are. They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat.” Donald Rumsfeld March 30, 2003

After Saddam Hussein, perhaps the biggest political casualties of the war in Iraq, at least in the view of armchair pundits, were a once-obscure but a now globally notorious bunch of American thinkers and activists called the neoconservatives.

Few loosely aggregated groups of intellectuals and their sympathisers in government have been as universally reviled in the popular mind as the neocons. For their persistent advocacy of regime change, and their insistence that the US should not shrink from using its military power to achieve it, they are widely believed to have provided the intellectual basis for the invasion of Iraq.

Five years after the invasion they tend to be viewed as either a gang of uniquely malevolent ideologues intent on widening American dominion through violent means, or a bunch of helplessly naive idealists who foolishly believed that it was possible to establish, by force of arms, a Jeffersonian democracy in the sands of Mesopotamia.

Either way, they are deemed to have been thoroughly discredited by the turmoil and instability that has characterised most of the past five years. And yet wild claims about the rise and fall of the neocons are wide of the mark.

Not only were they perhaps not quite as critical in the Bush Administration decision-making as is widely believed but also their ideas may yet prove to be critical underpinnings for US foreign policy in the years ahead.

It is certainly true that, though President Bush began his second term in 2005 committed to the quintessentially neocon objective of “ending tyranny in our world”, in practice the neoconservatives have been consigned to the wings in the past few years.

A quick “where are they now?” accounting of the most prominent neocons who were involved in Iraq decision-making underscores how far they have fallen. Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary, who, perhaps more than anyone in the Administration, was a fervent believer in the moral case for for toppling Saddam, was cashiered out of the Pentagon in 2005 to become President of the World Bank.

A year later his fall from grace was complete when he was forced to resign over allegations that he had arranged favourable treatment for his girlfriend.

Lewis “Scooter” Libby, another committed and forceful advocate of the war, the former Chief of Staff of Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, was convicted of perjury in the infamous Valerie Plame leak case in 2006, and though pardoned by President Bush still languishes in the professional obscurity that befalls disgraced Washington politicians.

Douglas Feith, the No 3 at the Pentagon, was another of the prominent neocons.

He left office in 2005 as one of the favourite goats of the Bush Administration’s critics. His attempts to rehabilitate his reputation with a book to be published next month do not look likely to be successful if early reviews are to be believed.

Outside of the Administration, it is easy to conclude that the atmosphere of heady self-confidence that surrounded such think-tanks as the neocon-dominated American Enterprise Institute, has dissipated with the setbacks that the Bush Administration has suffered in the Middle East.

Furthermore, it looks as though the policies espoused by the neocons have been largely rejected in the second Bush term. The aggressive confrontation with Iran that many neocons favoured has been shelved in favour of a nervous, and slightly helpless, policy.

Condoleezza Rice, once – a decade ago – a hardheaded foreign policy realist, then briefly, during the Iraq war, an enthusiastic idealist neocon activist, is now back in her past, limiting herself to the dreary business of what might be possible in American foreign policy rather than what a confident US might be able to achieve.

And yet too much can be made of this supposed recent change in American foreign policy.

First, it was never really the case that the Iraq war was an exclusively neoconservative project. Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary at the time, and Mr Cheney were never much impressed by grand theories about the promotion of US democracy but they were the two most influential voices in the drive to war. Both saw American objectives, at least at the outset, as primarily to smash Saddam’s power, to demonstrate America’s unlimited global military reach and send a stern warning to the nation’s enemies everywhere.

In fact, you could easily argue that it was an insufficiency of idealistic neoconservative zeal, not an excess of it, that so undermined US military efforts in Iraq.

Mr Rumsfeld especially, as he is expected to argue in his forthcoming memoirs, never much believed in the idea that the US should try for a transformation of the political culture of Iraq. That was presumably why he resisted the calls of some neocons for a much greater commitment of US military resources to the war. His favoured approach seems to have been a quick victory over Saddam, his replacement by a US-friendly government and a quick exit by US forces, not the long occupation that real political transformation evidently requires.

What is more, it is probably fair to say that it was only when Mr Bush dismissed Mr Rumsfeld and started to listen more closely to what neoconservatives such as the AEI scholar Fred Kagan were saying that US fortunes in Iraq began to turn around.

Mr Kagan was one of the intellectual authors of the “surge”, the steep acceleration of US military efforts that was hatched last year and which seems to have produced the clearest signs of success in stabilising Iraq since the US invaded five years ago.

Some neocons, it is true, were guilty of blithe underestimation of the difficulties of the task in Iraq. But it is worth remembering that the basic objective of US policy now – in Iraq and in Afghanistan – remains not just stability but the painstaking creation of recognisably democratic political structures.

Even as approval ratings for President Bush continue to languish at historic lows, it is not at all clear that future US policy is going to deviate radically from the goals that he has laid down.

Neither Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton is likely, despite the rhetoric, to effect an early departure of US troops and the relapse of Iraqi politics into tyrannical stability.

And John McCain, the near-certain Republican nominee, is a fervent supporter of neoconservative objectives in foreign policy. He was a prime mover behind the Iraq surge.

He plans significant increases in US military resources and he takes a radical, quasi-ideologically assertive line on other aspects of US foreign policy such as dealing with the challenges from the undemocratic powers in Russia and China.

In the end none of this should be all that surprising. Despite their much-maligned ideas and claims these past few years, the neocons were not really far out of line with the historic objectives of US foreign policy.

Idealism, a firm faith in the transforming capabilities of US power, has long been a central part of how Americans see their role in the world. The belief, perhaps touchingly naive at times, in the redemptive power and universal applicability of freedom and democracy, is unlikely to stop being the central pillar of American global policy just because of the supposed discrediting of a group of like-minded intellectuals.

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