Developments in Palestine, Iraq, and Haiti are again demonstrating that economic sanctions and other forms of collective punishment are at best counterproductive and at worst often more murderous than military strikes.

Remember when a schoolteacher would punish the whole class for the misbehavior of one or two anonymous students? Did it work?

If your experience was like mine, most of the time it did not. The misbehavers were usually among the more aggressive and popular students. They were not about to incriminate themselves. And usually no one else wanted to turn them in, because that would be "ratting" and could lead to being beaten up. The outcome was that everyone ended up hating the teacher.

Collective punishment is no more effective when exercised against entire nations. Yet that is exactly the approach being taken by the United Nations, the United States and Israel against "terrorists" and "rogue states," with equally dubious results.

When Israel responds to suicide bombings by rolling tanks into major Palestinian cities and imposing round-the-clock curfews, it antagonizes the entire population. All residents -- regardless of political sympathies -- are barred from going to work or even obtaining food and medical care. The Palestinian middle class, Israel's best hope for moderation, is being thrust into poverty. Even when such operations yield a handful of "terrorists," their overall effect is to generate far greater numbers of recruits to extremist causes and a new round of suicide bombings.

Though justified in the name of "security," collective punishments only lead to greater insecurity.

Iraqi children suffer

U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq have proven equally ineffective. They have failed to compel Saddam Hussein to allow inspections of sites where weapons of mass destruction may be stored or under development.

Instead, the most devastating impact has been on Iraqi children. Resigning his post in 1998, the head of the United Nations' humanitarian workers in Iraq said that sanctions "are starving to death 6,000 Iraqi infants every month, ignoring the human rights of ordinary Iraqis and turning a whole generation against the West." The sanctions were recently fine-tuned, but that has neither improved their effectiveness, nor altogether eliminated the harm done to ordinary Iraqis.

For several years, the United States and European countries have been withholding economic aid from Haiti, in an effort to compel President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to privatize state-owned utilities and to strike a deal with his political adversaries. Yet there is no sign that either Aristide or his opposition are any more ready to compromise now than before.

The people paying the price are -- once again -- the innocent. In desperation, some Haitians are now eating clay seasoned in bouillon. Polio is reappearing. In the slums, teenagers lie on sheets spread over concrete porches, dying of tuberculosis.

The justification for economic sanctions and aid boycotts is that they are more humane than military actions. But as Americans should realize after four decades of the Cuban embargo, they do not work. And, as Iraqis are quick to point out, even the much-publicized "collateral damage" of modern "smart" weaponry has proved to be a lot less destructive to civilian populations than economic sanctions.

South Africa is often cited as a case where economic sanctions worked. But other factors helped bring down Apartheid, including diplomatic isolation, splits among whites and between whites and South Asians, a growing threat from guerrilla bases harbored by neighboring countries, and the demographic reality of an enormous and fast-growing Black majority.

Economic sanctions discriminate

Elsewhere, as in Serbia, they clearly failed. It was only after the Clinton administration moved to military action that the "ethnic cleansing" of Kosovo ceased.

The basic problem is that economic sanctions, like other forms of collective punishment, are indiscriminate. They strike the innocent along with the guilty. And they often strike the most vulnerable including children especially hard.

They also offend basic notions of justice, under which only those who cause offenses should be punished. Were domestic police forces to resort to collective punishments, respect for law and order would soon break down.

It is time to renounce collective punishment in international relations, just as we renounce it in domestic affairs. Where absolutely necessary, it is a lot more ethical to use targeted military force than to inflict serious harm on an entire civilian population. GVNN/Pacific News Service

ANDREW REDING (areding@earthlink.net) is a senior fellow with the World Policy Institute in New York.