Tabaco, Armas de Fuego y Explosivos (ATF) en los estados que colindan con
México.
En la gestación del proyecto me encontré con las múltiples caras del
escepticismo: “¿A poco crees que Barack Obama les va a hacer caso?” -me decía
más de alguno o alguna. No hay por supuesto seguridad de que se entere de las
peticiones y responda positivamente. Una campaña como ésta es como cualquier
guerra o romance, se sabe cómo empieza, pero no cuándo o cómo termina.
En política los números cuentan. Si en los próximos meses crece la recolección
de firmas, eso influirá en el nivel del funcionario que recibirá formalmente la
carta en septiembre. No será lo mismo entregárselo en persona a Barack Obama a
observar la firmeza con la cual le ponen el sello de recibido en la Oficialía de
Partes del Departamento de Estado.
Pase lo que pase, la iniciativa tiene ventajas inmediatas. La primera es
incrementar la colaboración con organismos civiles estadounidenses preocupados
por lo que sucede en México y difundir la incongruencia de una potencia militar
capaz de imponer un embargo de armas a Libia mientras guarda un silencio
cómplice ante el contrabando masivo de armas a México.
En el último año he recibido miles de correos de personas que quieren hacer
“algo” para influir en la vida pública. Esa es otra confirmación de que hay un
sector de la población mexicana decidido a pelear por causas que se consideran
justas. Poner una firma en www.alianzacivica.org.mx tal vez no conduzca a un
adiós definitivo a las armas, pero sí es una manera de sacudirse el lastre de la
impotencia y decirle adiós a la pasividad.
autor: sergio aguayo

“Así es como la comunidad internacional debería trabajar”, dijo ayer Barack Obama en su semanal discurso radiofónico, “más naciones, no solo Estados Unidos, compartiendo la responsabilidad y el coste de mantener la paz y la seguridad”.

Pese a esas palabras, si un conflicto similar al de Libia ocurriera en México, seguramente Estados Unidos habría asumido el peso de la crisis sin contar con nadie. Libia -como Marruecos o Argelia- es el México de Europa, por su influencia en dos asuntos estratégicos: el petróleo y la emigración. Europa debería, por tanto, haber cargado plenamente con la responsabilidad. Carece, sin embargo, de los recursos militares y la unidad política que se requieren para hacerlo. Sin la participación norteamericana, esta guerra no se habría producido.

La diferencia en esta ocasión es que, con un presidente elegido para acabar guerras más que para empezarlas, Estados Unidos ha querido participar a medias, sin verdadero liderazgo, con un compromiso corto y una voluntad política escasa.

Barack Obama no cumplió con el rito de dirigirse a sus ciudadanos desde el Despacho Oval para comunicarles las razones y circunstancias por las que había dado órdenes a sus tropas de entrar en combate en Libia. En lugar de eso, se fue de viaje a América Latina y dirigió las operaciones desde líneas de comunicación seguras instaladas en hoteles de Río de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile o San Salvador.

Desde el primer día del ataque confesó su deseo de transferir el mando cuanto antes, y si todavía no lo ha hecho por completo es porque nadie es capaz de asumirlo con plenas garantías. Obama quería hacer una miniguerra, una pequeña acción quirúrgica de 48 horas, y ceder después el terreno para que combatiesen otros. Si no ha ocurrido así aún, y quizá no llegue a ocurrir nunca, es porque su retirada hubiera significado el final también de la operación.

La lección que se extrae resulta, por tanto, desoladora: la de un mundo condenado a seguir la dirección de Estados Unidos o a sumergirse en la inacción.

En los últimos años, Estados Unidos se ha embarcado, solo o con compañía, en varias aventuras militares de mejor o peor aceptación internacional. Actualmente, sin contar sus bases y centros de mando permanentes en todo el mundo, tiene todavía 50.000 soldados en Irak, 100.000 en Afganistán, 35.000 en el golfo Pérsico como fuerzas de apoyo en esos dos conflictos, además de un portaaviones y 17.000 marines en Japón ayudando en las labores de rescate. Sus soldados se ven obligados a rotar en el frente con mayor frecuencia de la debida porque sus recursos están al límite. Desde el ángulo económico, cada misil de crucero Tomahawk que ha lanzado contra Libia -unos 200- cuesta alrededor de un millón de euros, cada hora de vuelo de sus aviones, más de 20.000 euros, cantidades que no son insignificantes en un momento en el que se pretende una reducción de más de 50.000 millones de euros en el presupuesto del Pentágono.

Al mismo tiempo, desde el punto de vista estratégico, la Administración norteamericana presta mucha más atención a la situación en Bahréin y su vecina Arabia Saudí, donde está en juego la estabilidad del mercado mundial de crudo, o Yemen, epicentro de la lucha contra Al Qaeda.

Es decir, no es un buen momento para una guerra en un país del que Estados Unidos no importa petróleo y contra un régimen que hace tiempo que no representa una amenaza para la seguridad nacional. Solo razones humanitarias han movido a Obama a participar en esta operación, aunque él haya descrito esas razones también como intereses nacionales.

El ataque evitó probablemente una masacre en Bengasi, y desde ese punto de vista un importante objetivo ha sido cumplido. Pero la amenaza de una represión masiva probablemente persistirá mientras Muamar el Gadafi sobreviva. Es más dudoso que se mantenga también la voluntad de actuar de la comunidad internacional.

Obama se arriesga a una crisis política doméstica si no pone fin a la implicación de sus tropas o define claramente un compromiso a largo plazo. Todo indica que optará por lo primero. En su discurso de ayer recordó que “Estados Unidos no debe y no puede intervenir cada vez que hay una crisis en alguna parte del mundo”.

Cierto. Es duro de admitir para los halcones norteamericanos, pero eso es una verdad que, en última instancia, debería actuar a favor de un mundo más equilibrado, democrático y justo. Para que así sea es imprescindible que otros puedan ocupar los vacíos que Estados Unidos deja en la atención a las buenas causas. Libia es, desde ese punto de vista, un desafío y una gran oportunidad.

That it was G.M. — rather than one of the Japanese automakers, which depend on many parts from their home country — that succumbed first to the shortage shows how much the industry depends on far-flung suppliers. But Toyota and Honda have shut their plants in Japan until next week as they try to repair damaged facilities, assess the state of their suppliers and determine how to restart production safely.

“The modern auto industry has never faced a natural or human calamity on the scale of today’s crisis in Japan,” Michael Robinet, the director of global production forecasts for the research firm IHS Automotive, wrote in a report Thursday.

G.M. said its assembly plant in Shreveport, La., which makes a pair of compact pickup truck models, would be closed for at least a week, starting Monday.

The company said it would resume operations there as soon as possible, but gave no estimated date for doing so.

“Like all global automakers, we will continue to follow the events in Japan closely to determine the business impact, working across the organization to maximize flexibility, supply the most critical operations and effectively manage cost,” G.M. said in a statement.

Production at Ford Motor has not been affected, but officials are still assessing the situation, Mark Fields, the president of Ford’s Americas division, said Thursday. “It’s literally an hour-by-hour, day-by-day type of thing that’s going to unfold,” he told reporters at an event to commemorate the start of production of the new Ford Focus compact car near Detroit. “We have to first understand what is the situation there, and then we’ll determine the appropriate actions that we need to take.”

So far, all auto plants in North America have stayed open despite the troubles in Japan, although Toyota and Subaru have canceled overtime shifts to slow production and avoid depleting part inventories.

In Japan, most plants remain closed. Mitsubishi began bringing plants back up Wednesday, and two Nissan plants in Kyushu restarted operations on Thursday, but Nissan was uncertain whether it could keep them running for more than a few days.

Toyota has said its Japanese plants would remain closed through at least Tuesday. Mr. Robinet said he expected the shutdowns across Japan to extend through the middle of next week, if not longer.

Each lost workday for the carmakers in Japan costs them a total of about 37,000 vehicles, Mr. Robinet said. He estimated a total loss of more than 285,000 vehicles, assuming most plants can be restarted within a week.

Every automaker faces slightly different circumstances. At Volvo, for example, about 10 percent of the parts come from 33 Japanese suppliers, seven of which were in the catastrophe area, including one on the edge of the nuclear security zone.

John Hoffecker, managing partner of AlixPartners, a consulting firm based in Detroit, said determining the viability of the supply base was extremely complicated and time-consuming. A plant that ships parts directly to a carmaker might have avoided physical damage, but it still cannot operate if a lower-tier supplier cannot fill orders.

An average vehicle has about 20,000 parts and depends on thousands of suppliers, and the sudden loss of any one could be enough to stop production, Mr. Hoffecker said.

“It’s a real scramble for everybody,” he said. “It could be a chemical plant that got hurt that supplies material to make plastic that goes into a door panel that goes to someone.”

For parts that are shipped by boat to North America, shortages could take about a month to materialize. But for lightweight, high-value parts like microchips that travel by plane, problems could crop up much faster.

G.M. declined to identify the parts in short supply at Shreveport or their manufacturer. A person with direct knowledge of the situation said just one part was involved and it was also used in other G.M. models built elsewhere in North America. G.M. is diverting parts that would have gone to Shreveport so it can continue building models that are more important or in shorter supply, said this person, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and so spoke anonymously.

G.M. has more than two months’ worth of the Shreveport-made pickup trucks, the Chevrolet Colorado and the GMC Canyon, in its inventories, so halting their production is unlikely to hurt the company or its dealers in the short term. They are far less popular than G.M.’s full-size pickups, the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra; G.M. sold 32,634 Canyons and Colorados in 2010, down 26 percent from the previous year, compared with about 500,000 of its larger trucks.

In general, automakers do not reveal many details about their supplier network, and several declined to say this week how many of their parts come from Japan. John Fleming, Ford’s executive vice president for global manufacturing and labor affairs, said parts were imported from Japan for “a lot of our products,” without elaborating.

About 20 percent of the parts used by Hino Motors Manufacturing, a Japanese company that makes components for three Toyota models at a plant in Arkansas, come from Japan, according to Shinichi Sato, treasurer and secretary of Hino’s United States operations.

In a nation where you can set your watch by a train’s arrival and a conductor apologizes for even a one-minute delay, rolling blackouts have forced commuters to leave early so they will not be stranded when the trains stop running. Some stores have been stripped bare of essentials like rice and milk, leading the prime minister to publicly call for calm. All the while, aftershocks small and large rattle windows and fray nerves.

While workers struggle to avert nuclear meltdowns at stricken power plants 170 miles to the north, residents of Tokyo are wondering whether to trust the government’s assurances that they are out of harm’s way.

The string of disasters has revived the notion — dormant since Tokyo rose from the firebombed devastation of World War II — that this city is living on borrowed time. Many people are staying inside to avoid radiation that the wind might blow in their direction. Others are weighing whether to leave.

But most Japanese are trying to uphold the ethic that they are taught from childhood: to do their best, persevere and suppress their own feelings for the sake of the group.

“I’ve been checking the news on the Internet, and I really don’t know who to believe, because first they say it’s O.K., and then things get worse,” said Shinya Tokiwa, who lives in Yokohama and works for Fujitsu, the giant electronics maker, in Tokyo’s Shiodome district. “I can’t go anywhere because I have to work my hardest for my customers.”

Those customers, more than 200 miles south of the earthquake’s epicenter, are still grappling with its effects. The computerized systems that Fujitsu sells to banks have crashed under the strain of so many people trying to send money to relatives and friends in stricken areas.

That has kept Mr. Tokiwa busy with repairs and unable to make any sales calls. Just meeting a customer or colleague has become a chore, with trains and subways not running on schedule.

The Japanese are bracing for further losses. The confirmed death toll was 3,676 on Tuesday, with 7,558 people reported missing, but those numbers may well be understated, and bodies continued to wash ashore.

A brief ray of hope pierced the gloom on Tuesday when two people were rescued from collapsed buildings where they had been trapped for more than 90 hours. One of them was a 92-year-old man who was found alive in Ishinomaki City, the other a 70-year-old woman who was pulled from the wreckage of her home in Iwate Prefecture.

In northern Japan’s disaster zone, an estimated 440,000 people were living in makeshift shelters or evacuation centers, officials said. Bitterly cold and windy weather compounded the misery as survivors endured shortages of food, fuel and water.

Rescue teams from 13 nations, some assisted by dogs, continued to search for survivors, and more nations were preparing to send teams. Helicopters shuttled back and forth, part of a mobilization of some 100,000 troops, the largest in Japan since World War II, to assist in the rescue and relief work. A no-flight zone was imposed around the stricken nuclear plants.

Japan’s neighbors watched the crisis anxiously, with urgent meetings among Chinese officials about how to respond should radioactive fallout reach their shores. South Korea and Singapore both said they would step up inspections of food imported from Japan.

The Japanese are no strangers to catastrophe — earthquakes, typhoons, mudslides and other natural disasters routinely batter this archipelago, which is smaller in land area than California but is home to nearly four times as many people.

Japan is also the only nation to have suffered an atomic attack. But by now, most Japanese have only read about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs in 1945, or have made the pilgrimage to Hiroshima to hang origami cranes and shudder at its museum’s graphic displays.

Many of the most recent natural disasters, including the earthquake in Kobe in 1995, occurred far from the capital. The last major earthquake to hit Tokyo was in 1923.

So for most Japanese, these hardships are entirely new.

“I’m a little scared,” Yuko Ota, 38, an office worker, said as she stood in a long line at Meguro Station in central Tokyo for a ticket to Osaka, her hometown.

“My company told me to go back now because they think the disaster will have an impact in Tokyo, and the earlier we go the better,” she said. “So for one week, to begin with, the whole company is either staying home or going away. I’m lucky because I can go be with my parents.”

Some foreign embassies have suggested that their citizens head south, away from Fukushima Prefecture — which is near the epicenter and home to the worst of the crippled reactors — or leave the country, directives that have led to a rush of departures this week at Narita Airport, Tokyo’s main international gateway. (The United States Embassy has not advised Americans to leave, but it is warning against departing for Japan.)

A number of foreign airlines have suspended flights to Tokyo and have shifted operations to cities farther south, and some expatriates left on Tuesday.

Ben Applegate, 27, an American freelance translator, editor and tour guide, said he and his girlfriend, Winnie Chang, 28, of Taiwan, left Tokyo to stay with a family he knew in the ancient capital, Kyoto.

“I realize that everything is probably going to be fine,” he said, but the forecast of another major quake, which has since been revised, and the nuclear accidents were strong incentives to leave. “Plus, our families were calling once every couple of hours,” he said. “So we thought everyone would feel better if we went to Kyoto.”

For many Japanese, the options were more limited, and excruciating. Even those with second homes or family and friends in safer locations are torn between their deep-rooted loyalty to their families and their employers and their fears that worse is in store.

Experts predicated that despite Japan’s ethos of “gaman,” or endurance, signs of trauma would surface, particularly among those who saw relatives washed away by the tsunami.

“In the tsunami they could see people dying right in front of them,” said Susumu Hirakawa, a clinical psychologist in Tokyo who specializes in post-traumatic stress and has been advising Japan’s Coast Guard.

He said the people of northeast Japan have a reputation as patient, reserved, and stoic, but “now there are too many hardships and struggles for them.”

One taxi driver taking passengers through the largely deserted streets of downtown Tokyo on Tuesday compared the rising uneasiness to the shortages during the OPEC-led oil embargo nearly 40 years ago, when a spike in prices led the Japanese to stockpile essentials like rice and toilet paper.

It has not helped that government officials and executives at the Tokyo Electric Power Company, which runs the nuclear power plants in Fukushima, have offered conflicting reports and often declined to answer hypothetical questions or discuss worst-case scenarios.

“I’m not sure if what they’re saying is true or not, and that makes me nervous,” said Tetsu Ichiura, a life insurance salesman in Tokyo. “I want to know why they won’t provide the answers.”

Like many Japanese, Mr. Ichiura is transfixed by the bad news. At home, he keeps his television tuned to NHK, the national broadcaster. Even his 7-year-old daughter, Hana, has sensed that something unusual is happening, prompted partly by the recurrent aftershocks. She cried, he said, before going to bed the other night.

“She understands that this is serious.”

Kennedy’s speech was an idealistic call to action. Eisenhower’s speech was a calm warning against hubris. Kennedy celebrated courage; Eisenhower celebrated prudence. Kennedy asked the country to venture forth. Eisenhower asked the country to maintain its basic sense of balance.

While Kennedy gloried in the current moment, Eisenhower warned the country to “avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.” We cannot, he said, “mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage.”

Furthermore, Ike warned, the country should never believe that “some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.” He reminded the country that government is about finding the right balance — between public and private, civic duties and individual freedom, small communities and big industrial complexes.

I suspect that most of us can, in different moods, sympathize with both the Kennedy and the Eisenhower speeches, with both the rousing idealistic call and the prudent words of caution.

The Obama administration has tried to emulate both impulses. During the first two years, it hewed to Kennedy’s seize-the-moment style. Now it seems to be copying the Eisenhower mood.

The campaign of 2008 was marked by soaring calls for transformation. Now the administration spends much of its time reacting to events and counseling restraint.

The Arab masses have seized control of the international agenda with their marches and bravery. The Republicans on Capitol Hill and in Madison, Wis., have seized control of the domestic agenda with calls for spending cuts.

The Obama administration has reacted to both of these movements by striking a prudent, middling course. Internationally, the administration has sought a subtle (overly subtle) balance between democracy and stability. Domestically, the president offered a budget so tepid that it effectively ceded center stage. He called for a few cuts but asked people not to get carried away.

On Friday, President Obama gave a press conference that perfectly captured his current phase. He acknowledged rising gas prices but had no new energy policy to announce. On Libya, he emphasized the need to deliberate carefully our steps ahead but had no road map to propose. On the federal budget fight, he spoke passionately about the need to reach a compromise. But when given the chance to talk about what it might look like, he rose above the fray and vaguely counseled balance and moderation.

It is easy to see why the president should be striking this pose now. Prudence is always a nice trait in a leader, especially in the face of a thorny problem like Libya. At a time when the nation is anxious, Obama is coming across as a cautious and safe pair of hands. The man is clearly not going to do anything rash.

Politically, this is a style that seems to appeal to independents. Obama is not going to get sucked into a left-versus-right budget battle and see his presidency get washed away. On budget matters, he seems to be playing rope-a-dope — waiting for the Republicans to propose something courageous and foolhardy like entitlement reform, thus giving him an opening to step in as the bulwark against extremism. It’s likely that he can win the next election simply by force of personality, by overshadowing his opponent.

Yet this current cautious pose carries dangers, too. Eisenhower was president at a time when American self-confidence was at its zenith; Americans were content with a president who took small steps. Today, most Americans seem to think their country is seriously off course. They may have less tolerance for a president who leads cautiously from the back.

Prudence can sometimes look like weakness. Obama said his cautious reactions to the Libyan revolution amounted to “tightening the noose” around Qaddafi. Yet there is no evidence that Qaddafi is feeling asphyxiated or even discomforted. As he slaughters his opposition, Western caution looks like fecklessness.

Prudence is important, but Americans do have an expectation that their president will be the one out front, dominating the agenda, projecting strength and offering vision.

All in all, President Obama is an astoundingly complicated person. During the 2008 presidential campaign, and during the first two years of his term, I would have said that his troubling flaw was hubris — his attempts to do everything at once. But he seems to have an amazing capacity to self-observe and adjust. Now I’d say his worrying flaw is passivity. I have no confidence that I can predict what sort of person Obama will be as he runs for re-election in 2012.

Si examinamos las causas y variables que intervinieron en la escalada al poder en diversos países europeos en los años treinta del siglo XX de estos movimientos antidemocráticos, observaremos que ese caldo de cultivo reinante era propicio para la aparición y reproducción de estas aberraciones ideológicas. La grave crisis económica que asolaba el planeta provocó paro y este a su vez desahucios, embargos, hambre, enfermedades, miseria, desesperanza, una clase política incapaz y desprestigiada… Y el planeta dando bandazos hasta 1939 y la II Guerra Mundial.

Si establecemos un paralelismo actual entre Europa y los países árabes, observamos que las mismas variables antes indicadas producen ahora una correlación negativa, es decir, las variables o causas intervinientes en el triunfo del fascismo en Europa son las mismas que empujan al mundo árabe hacia la búsqueda de justicia, libertad y prosperidad. No deja de ser extraño que mientras Europa camina cada vez más hacia una democracia cuantitativa o financiera estos países cabalgan por sendas románticas en busca de una democracia plena y de calidad. ¡Con permiso de Occidente, por supuesto!

Men tend to be especially blessed with self-esteem. Men are the victims of unintentional drowning more than twice as often as women. That’s because men have tremendous faith in their own swimming ability, especially after they’ve been drinking.

Americans are similarly endowed with self-esteem. When pollsters ask people around the world to rate themselves on a variety of traits, they find that people in Serbia, Chile, Israel and the United States generally supply the most positive views of themselves. People in South Korea, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan and Morocco are on the humble side of the rankings.

Yet even from this high base, there is some evidence to suggest that Americans have taken self-approval up a notch over the past few decades. Start with the anecdotal evidence. It would have been unthinkable for a baseball player to celebrate himself in the batter’s box after a home-run swing. Now it’s not unusual. A few decades ago, pop singers didn’t compose anthems to their own prowess; now those songs dominate the charts.

American students no longer perform particularly well in global math tests. But Americans are among the world leaders when it comes to thinking that we are really good at math.

Students in the Middle East, Africa and the United States have the greatest faith in their math skills. Students in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan have much less self-confidence, though they actually do better on the tests.

In a variety of books and articles, Jean M. Twenge of San Diego State University and W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia have collected data suggesting that American self-confidence has risen of late. College students today are much more likely to agree with statements such as “I am easy to like” than college students 30 years ago. In the 1950s, 12 percent of high school seniors said they were a “very important person.” By the ’90s, 80 percent said they believed that they were.

In short, there’s abundant evidence to suggest that we have shifted a bit from a culture that emphasized self-effacement — I’m no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than me — to a culture that emphasizes self-expansion.

Writers like Twenge point out that young people are bathed in messages telling them how special they are. Often these messages are untethered to evidence of actual merit. Over the past few decades, for example, the number of hours college students spend studying has steadily declined. Meanwhile, the average G.P.A. has steadily risen.

Some argue that today’s child-rearing and educational techniques have produced praise addicts. Roni Caryn Rabin of The Times recently reported on some research that found that college students would rather receive a compliment than eat their favorite food or have sex.

If Americans do, indeed, have a different and larger conception of the self than they did a few decades ago, I wonder if this is connected to some of the social and political problems we have observed over the past few years.

I wonder if the rise of consumption and debt is in part influenced by people’s desire to adorn their lives with the things they feel befit their station. I wonder if the rise in partisanship is influenced in part by a narcissistic sense that, “I know how the country should be run and anybody who disagrees with me is just in the way.”

Most pervasively, I wonder if there is a link between a possible magnification of self and a declining saliency of the virtues associated with citizenship.

Citizenship, after all, is built on an awareness that we are not all that special but are, instead, enmeshed in a common enterprise. Our lives are given meaning by the service we supply to the nation. I wonder if Americans are unwilling to support the sacrifices that will be required to avert fiscal catastrophe in part because they are less conscious of themselves as components of a national project.

Perhaps the enlargement of the self has also attenuated the links between the generations. Every generation has an incentive to push costs of current spending onto future generations. But no generation has done it as freely as this one. Maybe people in the past had a visceral sense of themselves as a small piece of a larger chain across the centuries. As a result, it felt viscerally wrong to privilege the current generation over the future ones, in a way it no longer does.

It’s possible, in other words, that some of the current political problems are influenced by fundamental shifts in culture, involving things as fundamental as how we appraise ourselves. Addressing them would require a more comprehensive shift in values.

Well, in Florida, a state representative has introduced a bill that would impose fines of up to $5 million on any doctor who asks a patient whether he or she owns a gun. This is certainly a new and interesting concept, but I don’t think we can classify it as a response to Tucson. Jason Brodeur, the Republican who thought it up, says it’s a response to the health care reform act.

A sizable chunk of this country seems to feel as though there is nothing so secure that it can’t be endangered by Obamacare. It’s only a matter of time before somebody discovers that giving everyone access to health insurance poses a terrible threat to the armed forces, or the soybean crop, or poodles.

Brodeur’s is one of many, many gun bills floating around state legislatures these days. Virtually all of them seem to be based on the proposition that one of the really big problems we have in this country is a lack of weaponry. His nightmare scenario is that thanks to the “overreaching federal government,” insurance companies would learn who has guns from the doctors and use the information to raise the owners’ rates.

However, it turns out that the health care law has a provision that specifically prohibits insurers from reducing any coverage or benefits because of gun ownership. A St. Petersburg Times reporter, Aaron Sharockman, looked this up. I had no idea, did you? Apparently Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid himself stuck this in to make the gun-lobby folks happy.

Which they really aren’t. The gun lobby will never be happy, unless the health care law specifically requires every American to have a pistol on his or her person at all times.

Great idea! thought State Representative Hal Wick of South Dakota, who tossed in a bill this year requiring every adult citizen to purchase a gun. Actually, even Wick admitted this one wasn’t going anywhere. It was mainly a symbolic protest against the you-know-what law.

Actual responses to the Tucson shooting — that is, something that might actually stop similar tragedies in the future or reduce the carnage — seem to be limited to a proposal in Congress to ban the sale of the kind of ammunition clip that allowed the gunman to fire 31 shots in 15 seconds. That bill is stalled at the gate. Perhaps Congress has been too busy repeatedly voting on bills to repeal the health care law to think about anything else. But, so far, the gun-clip ban has zero Republican supporters, which is a problem given the matter of the Republicans being in the House majority.

Meanwhile in the states, legislation to get more guns in more places (public libraries, college campuses) is getting a more enthusiastic reception.

The nation’s state legislators seem to be troubled by a shortage of things they can do to make the National Rifle Association happy. Once you’ve voted to allow people to carry guns into bars (Georgia), eliminated the need for getting a permit to carry a concealed weapon (Arizona) and designated your own official state gun (Utah — awaiting the governor’s signature), it gets hard to come up with new ideas.

This may be why so many states are now considering laws that would prohibit colleges and universities from barring guns on campus.

“It’s about people having the right to personal protection,” said Daniel Crocker, the southwest regional director for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus.

Concealed Carry on Campus is a national organization of students dedicated to opening up schools to more weaponry. Every spring it holds a national Empty Holster Protest “symbolizing that disarming all law-abiding citizens creates defense-free zones, which are attractive targets for criminals.”

And you thought the youth of America had lost its idealism. Hang your head.

The core of the great national gun divide comes down to this: On one side, people’s sense of public safety goes up as the number of guns goes down; the other side responds to every gun tragedy by reflecting that this might have been averted if only more legally armed citizens had been on the scene.

I am on the first side simply because I believe that in a time of crisis, there is no such thing as a good shot.

“Police, on average, for every 10 rounds fired, I think, actually strike something once or twice, and they are highly trained,” said Bill Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner.

Concealed Carry on Campus envisions a female student being saved from an armed assailant by a freshman with a concealed weapon permit. I see a well-intentioned kid with a pistol trying to intervene in a scary situation and accidentally shooting the victim.

And, somehow, it’ll all turn out to be the health care reform law’s fault.

It may be possible to sink to greater depths but right now I can’t think how.

Sir Howard Davies, the director of the L.S.E., had the decency to resign over the school’s financial links to Qaddafi and his own misjudgments. If only the L.S.E. were an isolated case. The Arab Spring is also a Western Winter.

I’m glad the United States and Europe have gotten behind the Bahrain-to-Benghazi awakening. But I’ve not heard enough self-criticism.

Hearings should be held in the U.S. Congress and throughout Western legislatures on these questions: How did we back, use and encourage the brutality of Arab dictators over so many years? To what degree did that cynical encouragement of despots foster the very jihadist rage Western societies sought to curb?

The West has long known what the likes of Qaddafi and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak did. Hisham Matar, the acclaimed Libyan novelist, has a new novel out called “Anatomy of a Disappearance.” His father, Jaballa, disappeared in 1990, abducted from his Cairo apartment by Egyptian security agents who handed him over to Libya.

For more than a decade there has been no trace of this cultured man, a former diplomat last seen in Tripoli’s notorious Abu Salim prison. His crime was belief in democracy and freedom. He has vanished leaving a fine novelist aching for closure, demanding — if his father is dead — “to know how, where and when it happened.”

There you have the Cairo-Tripoli axis. They were useful, Mubarak and Qaddafi, for intelligence and renditions and a cold Israeli peace in the case of the Egyptian; for oil and gas in the case of the Libyan. They were also killers.

Disappear is a transitive verb for dictators. That’s what they do to foes, disappear them in the night for questioning that becomes a nameless forever.

No law governs these captives’ fate. They vanish — and then they are tossed into mass graves. Qaddafi massacred over 1,000 political prisoners at Abu Salim in June 1996. Was Jaballa Matar among them?

It’s important to have names. The skulls in the sand were once sentient beings who screamed for justice.

The entire Western world has been complicit in the pain of Hisham Matar, whose first novel “In the Country of Men” was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The West has embraced every Arab dictator now being toppled by the people they starved of rights and life itself.

Matar told The New Yorker this was “an appropriate moment for Americans to reflect on how they have for three decades allowed their elected officials to support a dictatorship as ruthless as Mubarak’s. To ask, for example, what are the reasons that have motivated the current vice president of the United States to say, as recently as Jan. 27, that Mubarak is no dictator.”

I think Joseph Biden might answer that question.

There are many reasons I oppose a Western military intervention in Libya: the bitter experience of Iraq; the importance of these Arab liberation movements being homegrown; the ease of going in and difficulty of getting out; the accusations of Western pursuit of oil that will poison the terrain; the fact that two Western wars in Muslim countries are enough.

But the deepest reason is the moral bankruptcy of the West with respect to the Arab world. Arabs have no need of U.S. or European soldiers as they seek the freedom that America and the European Union were content to deny them. Qaddafi can be undermined without Western military intervention. He cannot prevail: Some officer will eventually make that plain.

Timothy Garton Ash, in his book “Facts are Subversive,” quotes the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz who wrote:

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.

You may kill him — another will be born.

Deeds and words shall be recorded.

Yes, the poet remembers, and Qaddafi’s deeds — his crimes — will be recorded. One day we will know what befell Jaballa Matar and the numberless dead. I just watched Mohamed Al-Daradji’s powerful movie, “Son of Babylon,” in which an Iraqi Kurdish woman looks in vain for her son, disappeared in 1991 by Saddam Hussein. At one point she says, “I’ve been searching the prisons and now I’m searching the graves.”

Let’s put names to the dead, dates to the crimes, and details to our complicity. I know the world is unjust: Nobody made a big fuss about Dr. Brahimi’s words three months ago. All the more reason to be severe in assessing lessons learned.

In his new novel, Matar’s chief protagonist observes, “There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.” He searches — “Everything and everyone, existence itself, has become an evocation, a possibility for resemblance.”

The foul Libyan regime that knows the answer must fall for the truth to be known. Closure time has come.

But now, for the first time in decades, the cemetery has multiple “unknowns” to bury – and it has itself to blame.

Criminal investigators looking into how eight sets of cremated remains ended up crowding a single grave have concluded that three of them are unidentifiable – not because of the brutality of combat, but because of actions at the cemetery.

The discovery of the mass grave in October came on the heels of a report by the Army Inspector General last summer that revealed widespread problems at the nation’s premier military burial ground: unmarked and mismarked graves, millions of dollars wasted in botched contracts to computerize its paper records, and at least four urns found in a pile of excess dirt.

The scandal led to the ouster of the cemetery’s top two leaders and prompted legislation from Congress requiring the cemetery to account for every single one of the more than 320,000 remains entombed at the nearly 150-year-old cemetery.

But in her first extended interview since the scandal at Arlington broke, Kathryn Condon, the recently appointed director of the Army Cemeteries Program, said that it will take years to fully survey the cemetery and that officials probably will never be able to account for every grave.

“It’s really not possible,” she said, noting the age of some of the graves and records. “All we can do is account for the record-keeping and the logs that were given in the Civil War.”

But Condon said the cemetery has launched an ambitious effort to repair its problems.

It is boosting its staff from 102 employees to 159, hiring additional funeral representatives, technology experts and ground crew members. It is buying more burial and landscaping equipment, such as hand-held tampers to level graves, which previously had been done with backhoes, she said.

“They didn’t have the proper equipment to do the job really to the standard they needed to do,” Condon said.

To prevent burial mix-ups, there is a new chain-of-custody procedure that guides the handling of remains. The cemetery has also trained 16 employees as contracting representatives. It previously did not have anyone sufficiently trained, and millions of dollars were spent on a botched attempt to digitize the cemetery’s records.

Officials have begun creating a master database that eventually would replace the flawed maps that have been used to chart Arlington’s 70 sections for decades. The cemetery has detailed aerial photographs of the sections, and plans to gather pictures of the front and back of every headstone. Officials would then match the photos with the cemetery’s burial records to find, and then fix, the discrepancies that Condon said would inevitably emerge.

In its report released in June, the Inspector General found that 117 graves that were marked on cemetery maps as occupied had no headstone and that 94 others that had headstones were marked as vacant. Since then, the cemetery has determined that all of the plots with no headstones were vacant or obstructed by trees, she said, and burial records have shown that those with headstones wrongly marked vacant were in fact occupied by the right people. A review of the records was definitive, she said, so there was no need to open the graves and take DNA samples, a step that Army Secretary John McHugh has said would be considered.

As the cemetery works to account for every grave, Condon said it would certainly find more problems: “There will be discrepancies.”

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division continues to probe how the eight urns came to occupy a single grave.

The grave, plot 5253 in Section 69, was supposed to hold only one set of remains, an urn that had been found by a cemetery worker in a dirt pile in 2002. It was buried as “Unknown” because cemetery officials could not determine to whom it belonged. The discovery of the urn and its subsequent burial were first reported by Salon.com in 2009.

In October, Condon spoke with a contractor who in 2005 had found another discarded urn, which, in addition to unidentified remains, contained a letter and a picture of a girl in a blue and white cheerleading uniform. He reported it to his supervisor at the time, who turned the urn over to cemetery officials.

Learning about this incident for the first time, Condon said she “called in pertinent members of the staff to my office and said, ‘Does anyone have any information they can fill me in on?’ ”

A grounds crew member stepped forward, saying, “Ma’am, I know where there is a gravesite where there is more than one interred.”

He led them to the grave in Section 69 where the urn found in 2002 had been buried as “Unknown.”

As investigators starting digging through the grave by hand, they came across one set of cremated remains. They found another. When they found a third, Condon said, she “looked at my attorney and said, ‘Get CID’ ” – the Army’s Criminal Investigative Division.

After eight hours of digging, they found a total of eight sets of cremated remains. The original “Unknown” urn was recertified as unidentifiable and reburied in the Section 69 grave. Shortly after the mass grave was found, investigators were able to identify three of the other sets of remains. On Friday, Christopher Grey, a CID spokesman, said the agency had determined that three others were unidentifiable. The remains were being held at the cemetery while the criminal probe continues, so it is unclear when they will be reburied.

Investigators were trying to determine the identity of the last set of remains, those found by the contractor in 2005 with the photo of the cheerleader.

“The bottom line is, we will do everything we can to identify the final set of cremated remains,” Grey said. “But we may never know who those remains belonged to.”