TUESDAY, America’s nightmare in Iraq passed an ugly milestone: The U.S. death toll in the “peaceful” occupation passed the number of soldiers killed during the war phase.

As this struggle continues claiming American, British and Iraqi lives, more Americans are questioning President Bush’s reasons for starting the war and his conduct of it.

Four months ago, a Newsweek poll found that 74 percent of U.S. respondents approved of Bush’s handling of Iraq — but in a poll this week, only 54 percent do. Even greater slippage was reported by Zogby International, which found Bush’s overall job performance rating was 82 percent positive during the traumatic days after 9/11 — but now it has declined to 52 percent.

That’s a significant drop in public approval, although it is still slightly above half. Many who back his war, we assume, do so from a patriotic urge to support any military action launched by a U.S. leader, regardless of circumstances.

Meanwhile, more reports are focusing on false claims that were used to justify the war. The Washington Post published an exhaustive analysis based on interviews with U.S. analysts and policy-makers inside and outside of government, that reveals a consistent pattern of distorted intelligence.

White House officials, “in public and behind the scenes, made allegations depicting Iraq’s nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support,” reporters Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus wrote. “The possibility of a nuclear-armed Iraq loomed large in the Bush administration’s efforts to convince the American public of the need for a pre-emptive strike.”

Earlier, in the New Yorker, reporter Seymour Hersh shot down the White House claim that dictator Saddam Hussein had attempted to order uranium from Africa. Officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency told Hersh the documents about nuclear material from Niger were crude fakes that could have been easily exposed by a high school kid using Google.

A new book, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq, by Sheldon Rampton and John Strauber, contends that the president’s team systematically exaggerated allegations to mislead Americans into thinking that Iraq was connected to 9/11, and that it was preparing to give horror weapons to terrorists to use on Americans.

By now, it is evident that none of those claims was true. The troubling question remains: What was Bush’s real reason for starting the unprovoked war?

These doubts, plus the deaths of young Americans almost daily in Iraq, are causing slippage in support for the first “pre-emptive war” in U.S. history.

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