“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 percent of its export revenue. Take the island, he argued, and the war is over. And to reassure any skeptics about the feasibility of such an amphibious assault, he reached for history: “We did Iwo Jima, we can do this.”

It is worth sitting with that sentence for a moment. An 8-square-mile island, Iwo Jima was fortified by the Japanese over years of meticulous preparation and garrisoned by around 22,000 soldiers who were under orders to die in place. The U.S. Marines who went ashore there on Feb. 19, 1945, endured 36 days of some of the most savage fighting in U.S. military history. Nearly 7,000 did not come home. Adm. Chester Nimitz, not a man given to purple language, said “uncommon valor was a common virtue” for those who fought there. He meant it not as a boast but as an elegy.

Graham invoked Iwo Jima as a confidence-booster, a proof of American can-do. He appeared not to know—or not to care—that it was the bloodiest island assault in the history of the U.S. Marine Corps. The example does not support his argument. It demolishes it.

This is not a small error of historical recall. It is something more troubling: the invocation of a historical event that is in direct contradiction of what that event actually demonstrates. Graham remembered Iwo Jima only as a prize—the flag-raising, the heroism, the ultimate victory—and discarded everything that made that prize cost what it did.

This has become the signature rhetorical mode of the people directing and celebrating Trump’s war.

When Trump wanted to justify not warning allies before the Feb. 28 strikes on Iran, he explained the value of surprise to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi by evoking Pearl Harbor. “Who knows better about surprise than Japan?” he said, seemingly delighted with himself. What no one in the room said aloud was that Pearl Harbor—the example that Trump had chosen as a model of a successful surprise attack—ended with the obliteration of the attacking nation. It is the defining instance of why surprise attacks on sovereign nations are dishonorable and self-defeating. Trump borrowed its tactical lesson while discarding its strategic conclusion, citing the opening move of Japan’s catastrophic war as vindication for his own.

There is a temptation to read all this as mere ignorance—the blunders of people who did not study enough history or who studied it only for its victories. That temptation should be resisted. Ignorance this systematic, this consistent in what it selects and what it discards, is something closer to a method.

The method works as follows: reach into the trophy case of U.S. military glory, extract the most luminous image available—the flag on Iwo Jima, the unconditional surrender, the liberation of Paris—and hold it up as authorization for whatever you wish to do next. Do not ask what the trophy cost. Do not ask whether the circumstances that earned it bear any resemblance to the circumstances you now face. Do not ask whether the lesson of the story you are invoking might counsel caution rather than action. History is not being remembered. It is being harvested. The images are real, but the lessons have been thrown away.

Here, we arrive at what I think is the genuine moral distinction of this moment, the one that separates this war’s intellectual architects from the merely reckless leaders that history has always produced in abundance. Politicians have always been somewhat insulated from the wars they start—the gap between the people who order the charge and those who make it has never been fully closed. This is not what I am describing.

What is distinctive here, what makes this moment grimmer than ordinary recklessness, is the quality of the ignorance on display. It is not ignorance of consequences, though that is also present. It is ignorance of the very events being cited as justification. Graham used Iwo Jima to argue that the cost of taking Kharg Island will be manageable. Trump used Pearl Harbor to argue that surprise attacks are wise. They are not making judgment calls about acceptable risk. They are citing, as evidence of feasibility, the historical examples that most powerfully argue against them.

Santayana warned that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. A.J.P. Taylor, grimmer and less hopeful, amended this: Studying history, he observed, teaches people how to learn from the past’s mistakes and make entirely new ones. Even Taylor assumed that something was being absorbed—that the ignorance, at least, was fresh. What we are witnessing now is bleaker still: a generation of decision-makers who have absorbed only the victories and edited out the costs so thoroughly that the costs no longer register as real. History as a trophy cabinet. History as a permission slip.

The people who sent the Marines to Iwo Jima agonized over the casualty projections. They knew what they were asking. Graham knows the name, the photograph, and the victory. He does not appear to know about the 6,821 graves.

Here is where Santayana’s logic breaks down entirely and where the true injustice of the present situation comes into focus. His warning assumed a rough symmetry between the ignorant and the condemned. The leader who forgets history suffers its repetition. The nation that fails to learn pays the price of its failure. The feedback loop, however brutal, connected cause and consequence. But the people who are misusing history in the current war against Iran—who wave Iwo Jima as a recruiting poster, Pearl Harbor as a punchline, and the Crusades as spiritual inspiration—are largely exempted from its costs.

The people who will pay—who are already paying—are the U.S. service members killed in the early days of Operation Epic Fury. The 168 students who died in a school in Minab, Iran. The families sheltering from Iranian drone strikes in Gulf states that had no vote in any of this. The motorists and farmers across the United States who cannot absorb the rising gas prices that the Strait of Hormuz blockade has delivered to them. The people of Iran, whose government is monstrous and whose long suffering at the hands of the regime has now been compounded by suffering delivered from the air.

These people did not choose this war. They were not consulted about its historical analogies. They are simply enduring it.