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There is no need to deliberately sink the boats (although to be clear, you wouldn’t have to sink many to prevent all crossings; most people don’t want to die). You go to Libya, find the most powerful warlords on the coast (there are only a couple of major factions) and pay them $500m a year to deal with the migrant issue, payment upon results. They could use the money and will be happy to help.
If GDP per capita was higher in 1946 there might be a point. In Iraq there has been largely continuity of government since 2005. The Shiites dominate but that is expected given they are a majority.
That was how it worked under Gaddafi and by all accounts the Europeans have tried to replicate the old arrangement.
Except Gaddafi had an iron grip on power whereas these warlords are themselves dependent on countless smaller militias, each of which have their own independent enterprises to profit from human trafficking. Haftar can make all sorts of promises but he can't actually enforce them even in the territory he supposedly controls. Even Al-Jolani has proven to be largely impotent at disarming the militias and he doesn't have to worry about competition.
If dumping money on warlords was enough to create a state then the Taliban wouldn't have rolled over Afghanistan faster than the Marines could leave. Forget 500m, they absorbed trillions and for all intents and purposes that money may as well have been thrown into a bonfire for all the good it did.
In 2006 Iraq was in the midst of a bloody campaign of sectarian violence in which Sunnis were purged from most of Baghdad. Estimates for the number of refugees and casualties created by the chaos of the period ranges between six and seven figures.
And that was before ISIS!
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This is almost entirely untrue, the Italians made a brief but largely failed effort to negotiate an arrangement but Frontex undercut them at every turn and it’s not viable without a broader deal, which requires a border agency that doesn’t undercut that kind of arrangement at every turn. Even if it wasn’t possible to stop crossings, of course, that doesn’t prevent an even simpler arrangement, in which every migrant illegally landed is simply deported, immediately, by air to Libya without any European legal process whatsoever, whereupon the local warlords can do with them what they wish. A second crossing (unlike the English Channel) from North Africa is beyond most of their means, so most would return to their countries.
As I’ve stated many times, victory in Afghanistan was absolutely possible in 2001. Restore the highly popular king (which America refused to do out of some absurd ideological republicanism) and execute about 1-3% of the adult male population per year. Implement a strict two child policy. Introduce communal and summary punishment, including the extermination of whole villages. Internal population transfers to rotate people away from traditional ethnic communities, breaking up family and ancestral ties. Extreme control of the Pakistani border to prevent almost all crossings. Regularly kill large numbers of ruling warlords (under the king’s nominal authority) to prevent complacency, and in certain territories kill a large proportion of tribal patriarchs to dismantle Pashtunwala by force, the same way Stalin and Mao handled rebellious tribes (they failed in some cases, as in Chechnya (where they weren’t close to tough enough), but succeeded in many others).
Of course this was unpalatable to western liberal elites, but I can’t stand the idea that it was impossible. With enough brutality, almost any society can be dismantled and reconstituted. It is only a question of will and incentives.
Savagery around the world is pretty common. As in Syria with the Alawites it was unlikely that Sunni minority rule over the largely Shia population would end entirely peacefully. It is still clear that, very dumb “Buh buh GDP doesn’t mean anything” European-leftist type arguments, average quality of life in modern Iraq for many people is substantially higher than in 2003.
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