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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana wrote his famous warning in 1905, when the great catastrophes of that cruel century still gathering themselves on Europe’s horizon could not be seen yet. He meant it as counsel directed at the powerful—study what came before you or be destroyed by it. The dictum has endured because it captures something true about the relationship between ignorance and consequence. Its implicit logic is one of rough justice: The foolish leader loses his war, the nation that forgets its history reenacts its tragedies, and the punishment falls where the failure originated.

However, the ignorant and the condemned often turn out to be entirely different people.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana wrote his famous warning in 1905, when the great catastrophes of that cruel century still gathering themselves on Europe’s horizon could not be seen yet. He meant it as counsel directed at the powerful—study what came before you or be destroyed by it. The dictum has endured because it captures something true about the relationship between ignorance and consequence. Its implicit logic is one of rough justice: The foolish leader loses his war, the nation that forgets its history reenacts its tragedies, and the punishment falls where the failure originated.

However, the ignorant and the condemned often turn out to be entirely different people.

That divide is playing out right now in the rhetoric swirling around the current war against Iran. U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration have appropriated history’s most painful lessons as decoration for their bad ideas, and they have done so in the most casual and consequence-free manner.

On March 22, Sen. Lindsey Graham appeared on Fox News to make the case for seizing Kharg Island, which is Iran’s principal oil terminal and the source of roughly 90........

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