This is an onramp to Interstate 80 out in the middle of Nevada, somewhere near Elko. It’s the lighting that I like. There’s something about it that makes it look fake, as if the whole thing is on a sound stage in Hollywood. But it’s not.

And for you fans of both FedEx and extreme symmetry, a bonus picture taken from the same place is just below.

Liz Sly is the Beirut bureau chief for the Washington Post. She says the military has confirmed that this letter is authentic:

BREAKING: The US military sends a letter to the Iraqi military announcing the “onward movement” of US troops “in due deference to the sovereignty of Iraq & as requested by the Iraqi Parliament & the Iraqi PM”. It’s a withdrawal. pic.twitter.com/tQHSsHTtez

— Liz Sly (@LizSly) January 6, 2020

So much water. So, so much.Kevin Drum

It’s been a long time since I’ve indulged my pet peeve about the whole “eight glasses of water a day” thing, but today the New York Times indulges it for me. Their expert is Mitchell Rosner, a kidney specialist at the University of Virginia:

For those of us who spend all day at a desk, Dr. Rosner said, it’s best to drink only when we feel thirsty. Overhydrating, he said, isn’t helping anyone. At best, Dr. Rosner said, “You pee it out.” At worst, it can cause the sodium and electrolyte levels in your body to drop to dangerously low levels. The condition, hyponatremia, can result in hospitalization and death.

….“It’s a popular idea among patients and a popular idea in consumer media that hydration equals healthy skin,” said Dr. Joshua Zeigler, a dermatologist at Mount Sinai in New York City. But that’s not exactly how it works. “It’s a complete myth that eight glasses of water are necessary to maintain hydrated skin,” he said.

….But if you haven’t quite hit your quota today, don’t worry: Your 2020 isn’t already ruined. The tasty beverages you thought of as dehydrating, like coffee, tea and beer, are actually hydrating. “Coffee is a hydrating beverage,” said Ms. Antonucci, the nutritionist. “If you’re drinking it, let go of the guilt. Enjoy it.”

Hospitalization and death! I imagine that requires a pretty spectacular amount of overhydrating, but still. You better watch out.

And that’s some good reporting on the coffee thing. I keep telling people they can hydrate with practically anything, but they never believe me. Maybe now they will.

In the New York Times, Susan Rice writes about Iran and concludes with this: “It’s hard to envision how this ends short of war.”

I’m not making a prediction one way or the other, but it’s pretty easy to envision how this ends short of war. In fact, the most likely scenario is that both sides continue to launch periodic “retaliatory” attacks, but they slowly wind down and we end up right where we started. That’s how things like this usually go.

I’m not saying that’s what will happen. President Trump could do something stupid, or he could goad Iran into doing something stupid. Who knows? But if I had to put my money on something, it would be another few weeks of bluster and low-level strikes, followed by everyone getting exhausted and deciding to call a nervous halt to things.

Dean Baker:

A New York Times piece on the troubles facing a steel factory in southern Italy asserted that closing the troubled factory would cost Italy 1.4 percent of its GDP. According to the piece, the plant directly employs 10,500 workers. That is a bit less than 0.05 percent of Italy’s workforce of 23,400,000. The piece is surely right in highlighting the importance of the plant to a very depressed region in Italy, but the claim its closing would reduce Italy’s GDP by 1.4 percent does not seem plausible.

That doesn’t seem very plausible, doesn’t it? And it’s especially implausible since the study quoted by the Times very clearly says that its estimate of the effect of closure is a 3.5 billion euro hit to GDP, or 0.2 percent of total Italian GDP. But hey, it’s just a number. Who cares if it’s right?

Evan Vucci/AP

Iran announced today that it is suspending all of its commitments under the nuclear treaty signed in 2015:

Here is the Iranian statement. (via @MehrnewsCom) pic.twitter.com/4lGM4LwtZu

— Ankit Panda (@nktpnd) January 5, 2020

Technically, Iran is not withdrawing from the JCPOA. As its statement says, it will continue cooperating with the IAEA and will “return to its commitments” if US sanctions are lifted. For all practical purposes, however, the JCPOA is dead and Iran’s nuclear program is alive again. Here’s the scorecard so far following our attack on Qassim Suleimani:

• US officials unanimously say we should expect retaliatory attacks on US assets.
• The Iranian nuclear program is back in business.
• The Iraqi parliament has voted to demand that US forces leave its territory.

Nice work, Mr. President.

From Hossein Dehghan, the military adviser to Iran’s supreme leader:

The only thing that can end this period of war is for the Americans to receive a blow that is equal to the blow they have inflicted.

Quite so. A show of strength is the only thing those American warmongers respect, amirite?

Kevin Drum

In the New York Times today, Ginia Bellafante tells the story of her pre-Christmas trip to LaGuardia airport:

“So, how much do you think the Lyft cost?’’ my husband asked as we checked in. He was looking at his phone with a sour expression. “Eighty?” I offered. In fact, the trip that typically ran about $35 had cost $192.

….Prices always climb when demand is very high, and demand is always high during the holidays. We expect this. Yet even by that standard, my experience has been startling — $50 to send a babysitter home to downtown Manhattan simply from the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge, late one night in mid-December. Friends and neighbors have shared similar stories of sticker shock.

I don’t live in New York City, so I’m curious: yellow cabs still exist, don’t they? How much is an ordinary metered cab likely to cost for a trip between Brooklyn and LaGuardia at rush hour? Surely nowhere near $192. What about a black car for a prearranged trip like this? Even that would be cheaper, wouldn’t it? Or is the problem that it’s impossible to get a cab in the outer boroughs during peak times?

What’s the deal here?

Iranians take part in an anti-US rally to protest the killing of Iranian military commander Qassim Soleimani following a US airstrike at Baghdad's international airport.Rouzbeh Fouladi/ZUMA

I had all night to while away my time, and I spent part of it by reading what everyone is saying about our drone attack on Qassim Soleimani, leader of Iran’s Quds Force. There was an awful lot of chatter about whether it was an act of war; whether to call it an “assassination”; and whether it was legal. I find all of this spectacularly uninteresting. For all intents and purposes, we’ve been at war with Iran for many years—at least since we invaded Iraq in 2003, in any case—so to the extent that “act of war” refers to something that might start a war, it doesn’t even apply.

On the “assassination” question, does killing a military officer during a war count as assassination? I suppose I’d say no, but call it what you will. As for legality, that’s just a mirage. What President Trump did is little different from what other presidents of both parties have done, and all of those things have been deemed technically legal by the appropriate administration lawyers. Beyond that, presidential actions in theaters of war are illegal only if, in the end, Congress enforces its will or the Supreme Court rules the action illegal. Until then, it’s legal in every practical sense.

But this is all semantics anyway. Why waste our time? The real question is whether it made sense to kill Soleimani and what will happen next. The Trumpies claim that Soleimani was just about to launch a huge attack on Americans, so killing him saved lots of innocent lives. This seems unlikely for two reasons. First, it’s not as if the Quds Force will suddenly collapse with Soleimani’s death. His deputy has already taken his place,¹ and if there really is a big plan in the works then he can pick up the phone and order it to go forward quite easily. Second, the Trumpies lie about everything, so your first guess should be that this is a lie too.

But is Trump lying? Here is Reuters:

Inside the plot by Iran’s Soleimani to attack U.S. forces in Iraq https://t.co/X3IVUCSLjv pic.twitter.com/DJDUb9jh6T

— Reuters (@Reuters) January 4, 2020

And here’s the New York Times correspondent covering ISIS and al-Qaeda:

1. I’ve had a chance to check in with sources, including two US officials who had intelligence briefings after the strike on Suleimani. Here is what I’ve learned. According to them, the evidence suggesting there was to be an imminent attack on American targets is “razor thin”.

— Rukmini Callimachi (@rcallimachi) January 4, 2020

So which is it? Razor thin evidence or a clear order to step up attacks on Americans? Hard to say right now. In other news, perhaps you’re wondering whether our attack will lead to a genuine hot war with Iran. Have no fear:

Gen. Milley, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Mr. Pompeo discussed the strike with Mr. Trump, who was winding up a two-week holiday at his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago. Senior officials concluded that “there was a reasonable chance” the strike wouldn’t spark a war and would instead empower moderates in Iran, a White House official said.

A “reasonable chance” of no war! Here’s how the LA Times’ source described the same conversation:

One briefing slide shown to Trump listed several follow-up steps the U.S. could take, among them targeting Suleimani….Unexpectedly, Trump chose that option, the official said, adding that the president’s decision was spurred on in part by Iran hawks among his advisors….“There was consensus in the president’s national security cabinet that the risk of doing nothing was unacceptable given the intelligence and given the effectiveness that Suleimani presents,” the official said.

The “risk of doing nothing” was just too high. Is that better or worse than a “reasonable chance” of not sparking a war? This is left as an exercise for the reader.

All things considered, taking out Soleimani strikes me as probably a dumb thing to do. I have several reasons for thinking this:

• I don’t think we should be in Iraq at all, let alone killing Iranian military leaders there.
• If we are going to stay in Iraq, this just makes things harder. Iraqi leaders, who have to run a country divided between Sunni tribes and pro-Iran Shiite militias, can’t afford to be seen tolerating this kind of thing. There’s already a lot of chatter that our attack will force Iraqi leaders to either put further restraints on us or else kick us out altogether.
• Escalation of hostilities almost never gets the other guy to back down. It doesn’t get us to back down, after all. Why should we think it will get Iran to back down?
• It’s pretty obvious that Trump made this decision rather unexpectedly because he was pissed that his previous escalation didn’t work. All the reporting I’ve seen suggests that virtually no one else really wanted to kill Soleimani. It was on the list of options presented to Trump specifically to make the other options look more moderate.
• A Talleyrandesque sort of devious statesman might—might—be able to handle the aftermath of this in a way that makes relative peace more likely. Unfortunately, Trump is an idiot who is doing this because he’s obsessed with Benghazi and wants to show his predecessor that, by God, a red line is a red line. He has no idea what he’ll do next.
• Among other things, our war against Iran seems to be escalating largely at the behest of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Following the lead of either of those countries is a bad idea. Following their lead when they actually agree on something seems like a wildly bad idea.

I’m no international relations expert, so agree or disagree with all this as you wish. But if there’s one thing I’d like more people to understand, it’s this: we’re already at war with Iran. We’ve been at war with Iran for a long time, and ever since Trump started his “maximum pressure” campaign we’ve really been at war. Trump’s effort to ruin Iran’s economy and bring them to their knees might not get your attention very often because America does this kind of thing a lot, but I guarantee you that it looks like war to the Iranian leadership.

¹Brigadier General Esmail Ghaani. You might as well memorize that name since you’re likely to hear a lot more of it.

Marian’s aunt got us a cardboard cat house for Christmas. It was sort of an Ikea-like thing that came in a flat pack and required us to put it together, which we did. And it turned out great! As you can see, Hilbert is quite taken with it.

But what about Hopper? It turns out that she likes it too—but in a slightly different, Hopperish way. More on that next week.