Last Wednesday, we heard that three more young American soldier deaths in Iraq have pushed the total over the top to 2,000. Their names are Richard Hardy, Timothy Watkins and, the 2,000th, George Alexander of Killeen, Texas.

Since President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier in that famous photo-op bragging ''mission accomplished,'' 1,863 young American men and women have perished. The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, tells us that 100,000 Iraqis have died on their own soil in this war.

Since the anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 24, when some 300,000 citizens from all over the country, including Alaska and Hawaii, rallied against the Iraq War, begging Congress to do its duty and step in to stop the war and bring our children home, 85 more American soldiers have died.

No Republican officeholders marched on Sept. 24.

With one or two exceptions, all the Democrats skipped the rally, and virtually none was available on Sept. 26 when 1,000 of the protesters stuck around in D.C. for a lobbying day. The offices of Sens. Kennedy and Kerry and Rep. Delahunt were cordial enough, and we met with their junior aides, but not with them.

I was part of that march and rally. I was there because I believe, like Cindy Sheehan, that there is no noble cause here, that the war was probably, as many say, for oil, for power, for some kind of Pax Americana that has nothing to do with the needs of our people or of those peoples we seek to dominate. The rationale for war, we now know, was built on a pack of lies.

I was there also because I worry about my grandnieces and grandnephews and what kind of a mess they'll have to cope with if we don't get it together and try to leave them a world where diplomacy trumps missiles, where kindness overrides greed.

I believe those who fooled the American people into war, with such tragic results, deserve impeachment. At the very least, their party should not be re-elected. But what of the Democrats? Some 56 million of us voted for Sen. Kerry, yet our voices are not heard forcefully in Congress. We hear Bush-light Democratic paraphrasing of Republican mantras: We can't pull out; if we pull out, those who have died will have died in vain; gotta support the troops (even if the policies of ''support'' mean that they come back home through Dover in caskets). The Democrats in the Senate and House seem to cling to their vote for the war instead of renouncing it as a mistake they made, as most Americans did, when they supported the war based on the aforementioned pack of lies.

Democrats in the House and Senate must wake up and become relentless.

They must lead the way out of this morass by demanding that the war be stopped, that it no longer be funded, that the troops be brought home, that there be no more Richards and Timothys and Georges on a dreadful list that denotes more lives lost before they've been really lived, and more families decimated with grief that never abates.

Stephanie G. Wall is a retired physician living in Cape Cod.

© 2005 The Cape Cod Times