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Israel is always in need of a good plan. The 33-day war with Lebanon began on July 12, 2006, when Lebanese Hezbollah, a terrorist organization backed by Iran, shelled Israel’s border and attacked two Humvees, killing seven soldiers including those killed in a subsequent failed rescue attempt of the two Israeli soldiers captured and spirited into Lebanon. Rockets landed in the ISCAR main plant’s industrial park. The plant shut down for several days, but there was no major damage, and business continued as usual after the war. Israel’s forceful response included massive air strikes, the invasion of ground forces, and the crippling of Lebanon’s Rafic Hariri Airport and other parts of the country’s infrastructure. As in Turkey’s conflict in the 1990s with Kurdish insurgents belonging to the PKK (for Kurdistan Workers Party), in which tens of thousands of Kurds were killed, Lebanese casualties were many times the number of Israeli casualties. There were up to 1,000 civilian casualties. The casualties got much more media attention than the much deadlier Turkish conflict with the PKK, perhaps because the Lebanese conflict was between different religious groups. (The media seems to relatively ignore the misery in Darfur, where Moslems are killing hundreds of thousands of Moslems and displacing millions.7)

By August 11, 2006, the United Nations Security Council approved Resolution 1701. Both Lebanon and Israel agreed to the resolution, which included troop withdrawals and, among other things, the disarmament of Hezbollah. Predictably, Hezbollah has not disarmed. Just because you negotiate an “agreement” and obtain a paper with dried ink signatures, it does not mean you necessarily have a deal in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the dollar is being weakened by the expense of our poorly planned ongoing Iraq War. However one wants to debate how we got there, one of the reasons we may be quick to enter into a war is because we have the military industrial complex to wage it.

On December 8, 2006, I wrote Warren a note about The Iraq Study Group Report. Despite the fact that we waged war in Iraq for more than three and a half years (at the time), we had recruited few Arab speakers, and we hadn’t trained people to speak Arabic. Only six of the 1,000 embassy staff in Iraq spoke Arabic fluently, and only 33 in total spoke any Arabic at all. There were “fewer than 10 analysts on the job at the Defense Intelligence Agency who have more than two years’ experience in analyzing the insurgency,”8 and the report didn’t make clear if any of them were fluent in Arabic, the language of the people they are trying to understand. Our costs were around $8 billion per month for this war, and we had spent a total of $400 billion.

The ultimate dollar cost of the Iraq War might reach $2 trillion in addition to lives lost—thousands of Americans, and tens of thousands injured or killed Iraqis. In January 2007, I wrote Warren about another movie, Why We Fight, a warning about the unchecked growth of a military industrial complex enabled by lobbyists and Washington think tanks. The Iraq war has been mismanaged. Besides possible overcharging by Halliburton, there were many reasons to investigate mismanagement of the war. For example, $12 billion, about half of Ambassador Paul Bremer’s budget for rebuilding Iraq, simply disappeared. I had to add a Bremer amendment to my theory of everything in finance: What is the probability you have someone handing out shrink wrapped bags of money that disappear from your organization? I doubt Berkshire Hathaway will be tapping Bremer’s management expertise any time soon.9

In April 2007, I wrote Warren and sent him a link to an article that appeared in the Washington Post:

When I lived in London, I joined . . . the American Women’s Club . . . [T]hey made it their mission to coax me to use my vacation days for bridge, hiking, lectures, short trips to the continent, language lessons and a variety of other activities they creatively planned.They called the club their Disney Land for