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What would Einstein say?

That's what I was wondering the other day when I was mulling over the futility of our Iraq invasion and occupation, and our more recent saber rattling over Iran's supposed pursuit of nuclear weapons.

I say "our," because whether you agree or disagree with President Bush's disastrous foreign policy, as Americans, we all own it. In the same sense in which Germans owned Adolph Hitler's reign of terror, we must ask ourselves - in particular New Mexico's nuclear-lab scientists - why we allowed the Iraq nuclear hoax to be perpetrated.

Forever linked to the first atomic bomb, American citizen Albert Einstein likely would have opposed - rather vocally - U.S. intervention in both Iraq and Iran, in spite of all the ballyhoo about them posing nuclear threats to the world's first and most potent nuclear power.

He certainly would have been among those who realized that the Bush administration, early in 2002, was using flimsy evidence to justify attacking Iraq, destroying the country and occupying it. Likewise, apparently, with Iran, which remains on Bush's hit list despite the latest U.S. intelligence report that concludes Iran halted its nuclear-weapons program in 2003.

Almost everybody knows Einstein, the greatest scientist in modern times, wrote a secret letter in 1939 that was instrumental in persuading President Franklin Roosevelt to pursue the development of the atomic bomb, as German, Japanese and Italian militaristic regimes threatened world order and democracies everywhere. Einstein was among those who feared his fellow German scientists were pursuing an atomic bomb.

Winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize, Einstein fled his native Germany in 1933, as Hitler rose to power. Einstein knew a thug when he saw one. He would have laughed at any comparison of the demonic Hitler to the third-rate Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein.

Few people might know that Einstein was at heart a life-long pacifist, who initially opposed forced military service after World War I and later opposed nuclear weapons - even though he had played a vital policy role in their development.

Born a German Jew, Einstein twice renounced his German citizenship and, despite his earlier pacifism, eventually realized that the only way to stop Nazi aggression would be with a more powerful military force. Though pacifists severely criticized him at the time for being "weak, indecisive and inconsistent," the scientist in Einstein clearly saw the global realities.

For Einstein, truth always trumped doctrine and ideology. He would not have been a slave to American nationalism and Bush, any more than he was to German nationalism and Hitler.

Like Bush, Hitler too once was admired. In a 1939 survey of incoming Princeton University freshmen shortly after Einstein became Princeton's most famous professor, the students - according to the biography, "Einstein, His Life and Universe," by Walter Isaacson - voted Hitler the "greatest living person." Einstein, they placed second.