On a quiet, blossom-filled street on the outskirts of Washington an extraordinary gathering took place recently in the house of Richard Perle, the former Pentagon adviser and Iraq hawk.

Had news of the meeting leaked a few years ago it would have been taken as evidence that a nefarious plot was being hatched by a sinister cabal of all-powerful ideologues and policy makers known as neoconservatives. For here they were, being served coffee and pastries – no alcohol – although it was evening: not just Perle, the host, but also Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defence secretary, officials from the Pentagon and Vice-President Dick Cheney’s office, and a smattering of neocon scribes and thinkers.

Five years on from the toppling of Saddam Hussein, it was a gathering of exiles who had mostly been stripped of their positions of power. The party was to commemorate – celebrate is not quite the right word – the publication of War and Decision by Douglas Feith, a leading neoconservative and former number three at the Pentagon, who has produced the first account of the origins and course of the “war on terror” to be written by a member of Donald Rumsfeld’s inner circle.

These days the neocons just hope for a respectful hearing.

Wolfowitz was punished for his part in the war when he was driven out of his job as president of the World Bank over exaggerated accusations that he pulled strings for his girlfriend, but he has not changed his views.

Mourning people’s short-term memories, he said: “Everyone says we’ve created a failed state in Iraq, but nobody stops to consider the failed state that Saddam was creating. He was hollowing out the country from the inside.”

Feith knows that when he goes to his grave, the words of General Tommy Franks, who led the invasion of Iraq, will be in every obituary. “The f****** stupidest guy on the face of the earth,” he called Feith. And George Tenet, the CIA director at the time, described him as “a man eager to manipulate intelligence to push the country into war” – a charge Feith vehemently denies.

Feith and his friends know that they have lost the argument for now about who is to blame for the mess in Iraq. At the party, Feith joked that “150%” of his admirers were in the room that night.

However, he feels better for having written a scholarly, well-documented book that sets out his side of the story and may eventually influence the judgment of history. The neocons have not given up the battle of ideas yet.

If John McCain reaches the White House they may even stage something of a comeback. The Republican presidential candidate backs the US troop surge in Iraq and takes a hard line against a nuclear-armed Iran.

Robert Kagan, an original signatory of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century in the late 1990s, is one of his foreign policy advisers, although McCain is also close to traditional “realists” such as Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state, who is said to be privately urging him to cool his rhetoric against Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader.

The neocons, however, bristle at the idea that they are somehow not realists and dislike the label that has been hung around their necks. Wolfowitz believes the term “neoconservative” has become little more than an “antisemitic” slur and that if they were white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants of the type who championed democracy in Germany, Japan and South Korea – or indeed as he himself did in the Philippines in the 1980s – their policies would not have been perceived as sinister.

There has been a lot of denial, Wolfowitz said, about the extent of the threat posed by the late Iraqi dictator and his links to terrorist networks. “We didn’t remove Saddam Hussein to impose democracy, but what were we supposed to put in his place – another Sunni general?”

Feith blames the CIA for faulty intelligence about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and believes that the Pentagon was clear-sighted about the problems of war, citing a memo by Rumsfeld in October 2002 that he calls “the parade of horribles”.

“It warned that the war could be longer, costlier and bloodier than anybody anticipated and that we could become preoccupied with it at the expense of other countries, which could take advantage,” Feith said.

According to Feith, the State Department and Paul Bremer, the leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority, turned what should have been a swift transfer of power to returning Iraqi exiles into a US occupation, which was naturally resented. The Pentagon had thought Iraq would follow more closely, though not entirely, the Afghan model of installing a leader and a government that would eventually win legitimacy.

When Bremer announced that the occupation would have to last until the Iraqis negotiated a complicated new constitution and held elections, “Everybody went, ‘Oh my God’,” said Feith. The Pentagon had a workable plan, he insisted – it just wasn’t implemented.

Whether the neocons’ solution for Iraq would have worked any better is one of those “known unknowns”, to borrow one of Rumsfeld’s famous phrases. Certainly it was never tried. As Feith complains, the CIA failed to foresee the extent to which Saddam laid the ground for an insurgency and mistakenly assumed that Ba’athists would not cooperate with Al-Qaeda and Islamic radicals. Perhaps the resistance would have been equally bloody had Feith’s original scenario been implemented.

One Pentagon critic of Feith told me: “They had a plan. Plan A was to succeed in Iraq on the cheap. Plan B was chaos, meaning that it was no longer a threat to its neighbours in the Middle East.” Iran, unfortunately, has filled the resulting gap.

Wolfowitz said he was hopeful that Iraq was becoming more stable. He felt Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, was getting everybody onside “except [Moqtada al] Sadr”, the radical Shi’ite cleric, and was performing adequately.

Feith noted that, “Nobody’s worried about Saddam any more, so they say, ‘Hey, he was no big deal to begin with’.”

He also pointed out that there had not been another attack on America since September 11, 2001 – success of sorts since the main aim of the war on terror was to prevent one. It will be some time before there is a definitive verdict on that.

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