One brother died when he was a baby. Antonio, our oldest brother, died in 1992 of lack of medical care. Three other siblings were murdered in our country's long conflict with Indonesia. Two of them, my brothers Nuno and Guilherme, were executed by Indonesian soldiers in 1977. The other, a younger sister named Maria Ortencia, was killed by a rocket fired from an OV-10 Bronco aircraft, which the United States had sold to Indonesia.

There is hardly a family in my country that has not lost a loved one. Many families were wiped out during the decades of occupation by Indonesia and the war of resistance against it. The United States and other Western nations contributed to this tragedy. But all redeemed themselves. In 1999, a global peacekeeping force helped East Timor secure independence.

I still acutely remember the suffering and misery brought about by war. Yet I also remember the desperation and anger I felt when the rest of the world chose to ignore the tragedy that was drowning my people. We begged a foreign power to free us from oppression, by force if necessary.

So I follow with some consternation the debate on Iraq in the UN Security Council and in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. I am unimpressed by the grandstanding of certain European leaders. Their actions undermine the only truly effective means of pressure on the Iraqi dictator: the threat of force.

Critics give no credit to the Bush administration's aggressive strategy. But it is the real reason that Iraq has allowed weapons inspectors to return and why Baghdad is cooperating a bit more, if it indeed is at all. .The war protesters are noble. I know that differences of opinion over such important issues as war and peace are vital. We enjoy the right to demonstrate and express opinions today in East Timor as an independent democracy - something we didn't have during a 25-year reign of terror.

But if the anti-war movement dissuades the United States and its allies from going to war with Iraq, it will have contributed to the peace of the dead. Saddam Hussein will emerge victorious and ever more defiant. Containment is doomed to fail. We cannot forget that despots protected by their own elaborate security apparatus are still able to make decisions.

Saddam Hussein has dragged his people into two wars. He has used chemical weapons on them. He has killed hundreds of thousands of people and tortured and oppressed countless others. So why, in all of these demonstrations, did I not see one single banner or hear one speech calling for the end of human rights abuses in Iraq, the removal of the dictator and freedom for the Iraqis and the Kurds?

If we are going to demonstrate and exert pressure, shouldn't it be focused on the real villain, with the goal of getting him to surrender his weapons of mass destruction and resign from power? To neglect this reality, in favor of simplistic and irrational anti-Americanism, is obfuscating the true debate on war and peace.

I agree that the Bush administration must give more time to the weapons inspectors to fulfill their mandate. The United States is an unchallenged world power and can afford to be a little more patient. But, ultimately, weapons inspections alone will not work. Saddam Hussein may surrender his weapons of mass destruction, but without the threat of force - or, sadly, the use of it - he will end up staying in power.

History has shown that the use of force is often the necessary price of liberation. A respected Kosovar intellectual once told me how he felt when the world finally interceded in his country: "I am a pacifist. But I was happy, I felt liberated, when I saw NATO bombs falling."

José Ramos-Horta, East Timor's minister of foreign affairs and cooperation, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996.

So it's useful to conjure a conservative war hero like Dwight Eisenhower and consider what he would do if he were president today.

After his experience with Hitler, Ike would stand up to the lily-livered pussy-footing peaceniks and squish Saddam Hussein like a bug, right?

No, probably not. .Eisenhower, who led the European Allies to victory in World War II and was president from 1953 to 1961, faced a crisis in Egypt similar to today's and effectively chose containment rather than invasion.

Likewise, even when faced with the threat of weapons of mass destruction, President John F. Kennedy chose to contain Cuba rather than invade it, and President Ronald Reagan chose to contain Libya rather than invade it. I hope we have the courage and discipline to emulate such restraint by Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan and today choose containment over war for Iraq.

In Ike's case, he faced a man perceived in the West as a far greater menace than Saddam is today - Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.

Nasser had the potential to upset the globe in a way that Saddam doesn't. Nasser was idolized by the Arab masses and aggressively intervened abroad. He helped the Algerians fight the French, forged close ties with Russia and infiltrated terrorists into Israel. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, the West was sure that the canal would fall apart and disrupt global trade.

Oh, the hawks will protest: Nasser didn't have weapons of mass destruction. Actually he did. Nasser's troops used mustard gas in Yemen.

European leaders were determined not to appease this "Hitler on the Nile." France, Israel and Britain conspired to invade Egypt and oust Nasser. "It was too risky to allow this adventurer, this miniature Hitler, to develop," Prime Minister Guy Mollet of France later told Nasser's biographer Jean Lacouture.

Ike was outraged and did to the Europeans what they are trying to do to us now: He forced the invaders to retreat and solve the crisis peacefully. "The United States is committed to a peaceful solution," he declared.

Thank God for Ike. If the hawks had been running the show then, we might still have troops in Egypt. .The hawks, to their credit, have a good recent record in their military forecasts. They correctly saw that the first Gulf War and the Afghanistan invasion would go easily, while doves worried about quagmires. But the Nasser hysteria also reminds us that the hawks have a consistent track record of shrieking obsessively and seeing one minor country after another as global threats - in an eye-bulging, alarmist way that in retrospect looks hysterical.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the hawks magnified the threat from Vietnam and Cuba. In the 1980s they obsessed about Nicaragua. None of the hawk threats were imagined, but they were exaggerated. .Now the focus is on Saddam, and it's true that he has been brutal and threatening for 25 years - particularly in the 1980s when Don Rumsfeld was cozying up to him in Baghdad and America was shipping him seven strains of anthrax. The last 10 years have been the best behaved of Saddam's career (not saying much), and he's now 65, controlling an army only one-third its peak strength, and he is in the twilight of his menace.

The arguments against containment of Saddam were also made about Nasser: It will not work; Western credibility will vanish if we back off; if we do not invade now, we will have to fight him in a few years when he is stronger. And yet Nasser faded away, as Saddam is already fading.

So one can accept that Saddam is a threat and that Iraq would be far better off without him, and yet prefer the Eisenhower approach of containment. We might remember that Eisenhower warned Britain in 1956 that its insistence on ousting Nasser was leading to sweeping anti-British sentiment, and that while "initial military successes might be easy ... the eventual price might become far too heavy."