Last night, I went to one of the many peace vigils across the country to mark the death of the 2,000th American soldier killed in the illegal occupation of Iraq. I held high a picture of my nephew, Marine Lance Cpl. Chase J. Comley, whose death on August 6, 2005 has devastated my family.

So many people in attendance approached to ask about Chase. I explained that he was the youngest child of my brother Mark.

The tragedy of my family’s loss is compounded by the senselessness of a war that almost 80% of Americans now agree never should have been waged because it was marketed on lies. Grief is hard enough, but add the ingredient of anger and there’s a combination of emotions that make conducting one’s daily routine even more difficult.

I chatted with a woman as we took the rally up Third Avenue in Manhattan from Chuck Schumer’s office to Hillary Clinton’s, two senators who should be ashamed of caving to the Administration’s propaganda about WMDs and mushroom clouds over our cities.

“I can’t listen to George Bush when he tells us that we must honor the dead by sending more troops to be sacrificed,” I told her.

“My father died of lung cancer,” she said. “Members of my family didn’t start smoking and supporting R.J. Reynolds to show loyalty to our dad.

Her analogy makes more sense than the rationale of this Administration’s war-hawks. Theirs is a similar narrowing of the mind that kept us in Vietnam in the same kind of war where people with less sophisticated weaponry eventually killed more than 58,000 Americans before we finally declared an empty victory, signed a peace treaty, shamed the soul of our country, and treated those soldiers who did make it home like lepers. I read somewhere recently that a Vietnamese was asked why they fought so hard and long against the SUPERPOWER. He said, “Because it was our country.”

And that is why we should withdraw from Iraq. It is their country.

Bush declares that “we will not step down until the Iraqis step up.” Well, Mr. President, they are stepping up—the Insurgency, that is. And they’re using weapons that, while seemingly primitive when stacked against our state-of-the-art “smart bombs,” are loaded with a common-sense message that the Iraqis want us off their land and far away from their oil. They are picking up the tempo and picking off our troops. It’s time to declare another hollow victory and leave, this time learning the lesson we so quickly forgot from Vietnam.

Missy Comley Beattie is a writer, living in New York City. Her nephew Chase was killed in Iraq on August 6, 2005.