More critics are coming out against the proposal of a White House Council of Historical Advisors

Should the White House have its own History Squad? The Harvard historian Niall Ferguson and his colleague from the political science department, Graham Allison, think it should. Writing in The Atlantic, the duo calls for a federally funded "Council of Historical Advisers" modeled on the Council of Economic Advisers, with a chair, "two additional members," and "a small professional staff." These court historians would be charged with finding past parallels to current events and then using their discoveries to supply the president with advice:

In 2003, to take one example, when President George W. Bush chose to topple Saddam Hussein, he did not appear to fully appreciate either the difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims or the significance of the fact that Saddam's regime was led by a Sunni minority that had suppressed the Shiite majority. He failed to heed warnings that the predictable consequence of his actions would be a Shiite-dominated Baghdad beholden to the Shiite champion in the Middle East—Iran.

There were indeed historians who made this argument in 2003. But there were also historians who wanted Bush to invade, as Gene Healy points out in a devastating response to Ferguson and Allison. "In fact," he reminds us, "there was a top-flight Middle East scholar, fully up to speed on the differences between Sunnis and Shiites, who had the administration's attention in the run up to the war. That was Bernard Lewis, 'Bush's historian,' who 'deliver[ed] spine-stiffening lectures to Cheney over dinner in undisclosed locations' and pro-war thinkpieces in the Wall Street Journal." If a Council of Historical Advisers had existed in the Bush years, it's easy to imagine the president appointing Lewis to lead it. (As Healy notes, another historian who cheered for the Iraq war was none other than Niall Ferguson.)

Lewis, to be sure, is a significant scholar whose work is worth reading, and I say that as someone who often disagrees with him strenuously. But that speaks to a bigger issue. Bernard Lewis' considerable knowledge about what has already happened does not necessarily make him an expert on what will happen. One of the best things about history as a discipline is that it doesn't pretend to be a predictive science—or, indeed, to be any sort of science at all. That isn't a flaw; it's self-awareness. ...