Sanctions are pretty blunt instruments, rarely effective and having many unintended effects, some of them wickedly cruel.
We should ponder that as Britain, the U.S. and the EU muse on the next stage in isolating Robert Mugabe, or indeed Iran.
Borders are always porous; dictatorships can insulate themselves from hardship; the poor may be and often are the worst sufferers.
No case illustrates this better than Iraq. There, we should not forget, the UN was pressurised into a 12-year programme of sanctions against Saddam Hussein, whose grim outturn is easily forgotten only because it has been outweighed in its inhumane consequences by the shambles we have helped cause through the invasion.
After the Gulf War, sanctions were imposed mainly at the instigation of the U.S. - with us slavishly following along behind, as usual. Saddam had been crushingly defeated in the war, but was still in power.
It was argued in 1991, by the CIA, with its unerring sense of incomprehension about other nations, that isolating Iraq would soon lead to Saddam being ousted by a rival, presumably more friendly to the West. Which, of course, never happened, or came close to happening.
The sanctions certainly led to intense misery - but not for the regime. Denis Halliday, the UN head of the programme allowing oil sales in return for food and medicines, resigned his post in 1998 with a sad comment. Imposing sanctions 'probably strengthens the existing leadership and further weakens the people of the country'.
The leadership certainly did not suffer. It remained able to lay its hand on whatever it needed by fair means or foul, while ordinary Iraqi families suffered.
Unicef, the UN children's fund, put the number of children who died as a result of sanctions at anything up to 500,000.
There had been a breakdown in water, sanitation and power. The exemption of medical supplies and food was of less value than it seemed, since items barred included many things which had a potential dual use, such as pesticides - which could be used for chemical weapons - computer equipment, helicopters for crop dusting and even ambulance communications systems.
The sanctions programme amounted to little more than trying to starve the Iraqis till Saddam surrendered.
There was a chilling message from Madeleine Albright, American ambassador to the UN under President Clinton, when challenged in a news programme.
How did she justify a programme which had killed more children than Hiroshima? 'I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it,' she said.
In the case of Mugabe, it is pointless in any case for us to impose sanctions if Mugabe's African neighbours do not. That merely leaves an opening for the cry that such a programme is just the old colonial powers at work.
In any case, some of his fellow African heads of government may well resist in case they, too, one day become sanctions targets. President Omar Bongo of Gabon (I am not making him up) seems to think that Mugabe is only doing what comes naturally. Bongo has secured himself in power for 41 years.
Demands that 'we must do something' - always a foolish cry in politics - are loud. But the wails of children pushed into even further distress and danger through sanctions should ring in our ears more loudly.
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