* President Bush overstated intelligence findings about WMD:

In the run-up to the war, President Bush said that the United 
States "must not ignore the treat gathering against us. Facing 
clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - 
the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom 
cloud... We have every reason to assume the worst, and we have an
urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring." [Washington 
Post, 1/28/2002] 

That was not the message that he was getting from the intelligence 
community. Here's an excerpt from CIA Director George Tenet's 
remarks about the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which 
summarized the pre-war views of the intelligence community: "Let 
me be clear: analysts differed on several important aspects of 
these programs, and those debates were spelled out in the 
Estimate. They never said there was an "imminent" threat." 
[Transcript of 2/5/04 speech at Georgetown University]

* Bush cited evidence that didn't exist or had been discredited:

In a September 2002 news conference, President Bush cited an 
International Atomic Energy Agency report that purportedly said 
Iraq was six months away from obtaining a nuclear weapon, when in 
fact no such report ever existed.

Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address, "The British 
government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought 
significant quantities of uranium from Africa." [Official White 
House Transcript, 1/28/03] Yet Ambassador Joe Wilson, who was 
sent to Niger in February 2002 to determine whether Iraq was 
trying to purchase uranium materials there, concluded that 
"intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was 
twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." [Joseph Wilson, Op-Ed, 
New York Times, 7/6/03]

* The war has been enormously costly, in human lives and in tax 
dollars:

More than 500 American soldiers have died so far in the campaign 
and more than 3,000 Americans have been injured. Thousands of 
Iraqis have also been killed.

The costs to American taxpayers for the war have already passed 
$150 billion. Pentagon officials said this week that the Iraq 
war cost taxpayers $14 billion between September and November 2003 
alone. [Associated Press, 2/12/04]

* President Bush has not been up-front with us about the costs:

The Pentagon's year 2005 budget doesn't contain any money for 
military operations in Iraq or Afghanistan. The White House won't 
ask Congress for that money until January 2005 - after the November 
presidential election. [Drew Brown, Knight Ridder Newspapers, 
2/11/04]