Hopefully CNN will try extra hard to sanitize the war footage from Syria once the bombing starts, now that we know how badly dead Syrian kids upset Kerry. Because you can be sure there are a lot more dead Syrian kids on the way.

Of course, Kerry’s sensitivity to dead children is a bit like Carter having a problem with liver pills. This is the same John Kerry who served in Vietnam, and who backed two attacks on Iraq and one on Afghanistan, is it not? One of the most iconic images in the history of journalism is a little girl, naked and burning, running down a Vietnamese road after a chemical weapons attack by the United States. And the US all but condemned Al-Jazeera as a terrorist organization for airing images of Iraqi children incinerated in the American attack in 2003.

For that matter, US “redlining” of a country for using chemical weapons is also a bit odd. In the same press conference, Kerry spoke of holding Iraq accountable for violating international, historically established norms. But the US itself has quite a history of violating such norms. In WWII, for instance, the U.S. holds pride of place not only for the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, but for being the first and only military power in history to burn hundreds of thousands of civilians alive with atomic weapons in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

As for chemical weapons, aren’t Agent Orange and napalm — the liquid fire used on that screaming little girl mentioned above — supposed to count? The cumulative effect of US chemical weapons use in Indochina is millions dead during the war in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — and millions more dead of cancer and genetic defects in the decades since.

While we’re on the subject of chemical weapons, the story just came out — at about the worst possible time for the US, as it’s rolling out its propaganda for another war — that the US actively aided Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in targeting Iranian troops with nerve gas. It was known for some time that the Reagan administration had shared intelligence with Iraq at the same time it was using chemical weapons in the Gulf War. But it turns out Washington was supplying intelligence in full knowledge that that intelligence would be used to identify Iranian troop concentrations for targeting with nerve agents. Iran was preparing for the strategic exploitation of a huge hole in Saddam’s defenses, which might well have turned the tide of the war and led to enormous Iranian gains at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates, increasing military pressure on Kuwait and other Arab Gulf states.

The overall American policy arc in Iraq from the ’80s on seems to be: 1) Help Saddam to make war on his neighbors; 2) help Saddam use weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors; 3) encourage Saddam to invade Kuwait; 4) bomb the hell out of Saddam in 1991 for invading Kuwait and making war against his neighbors; 5) bomb the hell out of Saddam in 2003 for possibly still having weapons of mass destruction.

In short, the United States simply does not give a rip about Saddam, Assad, or anyone else using chemical weapons or committing war crimes of any kind. The US routinely supports regimes that engage in war crimes — and then publicly condemns them for war crimes only when they stop taking orders from Washington or otherwise become a liability. War crimes by official enemies are just a propaganda point for selling wars to the public.

Consumer advisory: Don’t buy a used war from this man.

The first problem is real but misunderstood, while the second is pure baloney. It is baloney since the NPT is nothing but a multi-state attempt to keep the knowledge of how to make nasty nuclear bombs within a small group. The overall aim of the treaty is not to save human kind from the horrible effects of nuclear war; it is to save the nuclear power oligarchy from competition. There is no reason why “new” nuclear powers should be trusted less than current nuclear powers. Unless you wish to keep the trump card while playing it over and over in international politics.

The problem of North Korea (and other countries) violating the NPT thus has nothing to do with us as individuals or citizens of the civilized West. It has only to do with “our” heads of states wishing to protect their special powers.

The other problem is the real one: the North Korean government isn’t to be trusted with lethal weapons. And to be honest, Kim Jong-Il seems like a real nut. But on the other hand, there are there any Prime Ministers or Presidents who could or should be trusted with such things? Most of them cannot be trusted with limited powers in government or even with small amounts of money.

The problem here has nothing to do with the specific nature of the North Korean government, which, I’m sure, is one of the most screwed up on the planet. It also has nothing to do with the North Korean leader, the cultified Kim Jong-Il. And it has nothing to do with the official ideology of his totalitarian state, “communism.”

Rather, it has to do with a much deeper problem. It has to do with the problem of rule and specifically the structure of government itself. As Lord Acton so wisely stated, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The problem of corruption should be obvious, be it the obvious corruption of “banana republics” or the more “civilized” campaign contributions and dealings in parliament. Corrupted people cannot be trusted, who knows who placed the higher bid and thus gets the full worth of the bribe?

Judging from our politicians, not only does power corrupt; the corrupted are obviously also attracted by power.

A North Korea with the recently acquired knowledge and ability to produce nuclear-based weaponry simply points to a much greater and widely spread problem: the problem with government per se. Since power corrupts, we cannot trust the ones with power. Then how can we trust them with the weapons to protect us from foreign threats; especially since we are at the same time forcefully disarmed by our “protectors.”

The real question here is: Can we trust political power with weapons to destroy us and our earth? Can government be trusted?

The questions are radical, but it should be obvious we, i.e. humankind, are in need of some radical change. We have, as a species, had more than a thousand years of experience of political government. What has it given us?

On the world level the result is at best racism and international “tension,” but wars and world wars as well. On the domestic level we’re experiencing excessive taxation and regulation, violations of constitutional rights and personal integrity, as well as executions and government control of young people’s minds through public schooling. In other countries, and during wartime, we’ve seen work camps, torture, and persecution.

The answer should thus be obvious. No, we cannot trust government. Perhaps we should abolish it altogether and get rid of the danger once and for all.