(I’m a few days late because I'm locked in on a secret project at the moment, so Defrosts will come second in priority for me.)
Technically, I’m not violating Rule One. R1 only specifies "don't talk about Israel-Palestine", and this isn’t a blog writeup about the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza. As always, I maintain that you can go elsewhere for better information on the subject; there is no need to share my strong and deeply held views.
I would only note, as supplementary to the subject of this writeup, that all the analysis in the world about the Gaza War is missing one sense check. The IDF is widely regarded as one of the world’s best armed and trained militaries, with an impressive history of victories (Communist Vietnam comes to mind as a comparison). They have been parked for several months in a patch the size of Philly.
They have failed to win. Picture the New Zealand Defense Force machine-gunning and bombing Auckland for several months to wipe out the Comancheros and Mongols, killing thirty thousand people without ever actually eliminating the threat. You could be the most fervent supporter in the world of aggressively pursuing Hamas, and this invasion would fail to meet your standards. (Which naturally feeds concerns about ethnic cleansing supplanting legitimate military targets as motive.) Give up. Go home.
Anyway.
Why the fuck did Mossad just 9/11 Lebanon?
9/11 is a hell of a term to throw about. The pager/walkie-talkie attack is magnitudes different by death toll. Every civilian killed (especially the killing of children) is tragic and unacceptable, but they’re worlds apart. The reason why I reach for 9/11 is because this attack evokes the feeling: shock at an attack of an unheard-of nature.
I can’t think of anything like this mass simultaneous bombing that has happened in human history. It is, frankly, something you’d expect as the plot of a six out of ten thriller. (I guess Kingsman kind of did this?) This was pitched in a meeting between top intelligence professionals, greenlit, developed through its stages, and, even as the penny dropped for Hezbollah, executed - both the first wave, and then the walkie-talkie strikes to exploit the fallback from the pager attack. (Hunger Games?)
That’s head-spinningly zany that this happened in the real world. For its unique nature and possibly historical significance, that alone should merit front page coverage everywhere, not just the international news. Another 9/11 hasn’t happened; another attack of this nature probably will. The closest comparisons I can think of are the mid-2000s terrorist attacks aimed at European public transport (e.g Madrid, 2004; London, 2005), which, of course, evokes the obvious: it doesn’t matter if a state is carrying out the attack in the name of a planned policy of self-defense.
Letting off hundreds of bombs whose locations you are unsure of, and some of which would inevitably be in shops and subways, is a terrorist attack against an entire nation. The vast majority of Lebanese people were not killed or injured, but the number who panicked, are distressed, have been traumatised is vastly higher than would result from any individual strike on a Hezbollah compound. You’re letting off an earthquake on demand.
This is well and truly terrorism on the cheap: no public mandate, no commitment of resources significant enough to produce an accountability backlash, and most certainly no international restraint involved. All it took was smart, experienced operatives attaching explosives to a bunch of cheap products, running the information side of the story to ensure this didn’t leak, and pressing the button when the time came. The burden now falls on the military to follow up with the threat of a full-scale invasion.
And the continued parallels between Gaza and Lebanon raise the question: why on earth would the Israeli government countenance reigniting the constant on-off Israel-Lebanon conflict at a time when the state is supposedly so committed to eliminating the Hamas threat and improving security for the average Israeli? If you suffered your own 9/11 in your national narrative not even a year ago, why wave a red cape to invite another, never mind risk more IDF lives and resources to reinforce a second border?
This is the foundation on which my eternal suspicion of counterinsurgent armies rests. I am not saying counterinsurgent armies never win, nor even that brutality can’t work. I reject brutality as a legitimate strategy, but, for instance, colonial empires were very successful at stamping out rebels, even as late as in British Malaya in the 50s. Russia conclusively won the Chechen Wars. The morally right perspective, in my view, is that you should not kill far more poor people in weak countries to make the citizens of the rich, powerful countries feel a bit safer because some were killed.
However, even if you set big-picture right and wrong aside, modern counterinsurgency macrostrategy from rich, powerful countries seems completely broken even for its own stated purposes. The people in charge get drunk on power and actively undermine every thing held sacred by their most ardent supporters: they risk the lives of more soldiers by engaging in more conflict, they bumble into more conflicts and make enemies instead of allies of convenience, and, at the end of it all, they only increase the danger to their people by inflaming motives for insurgents.
Indeed, often they even end up making people feel more insecure and more in danger, because that’s exactly what they profit off of. Above all, that’s why there’s no use carrying water for Israel right now. Even if you come down on the pro-Israeli side, even if you have serious concerns about my arguments, the simple fact of the matter is that Benjamin Netanyahu will do whatever he can to cling onto power. I do not think the world should wait to see how much more blood he’s willing to squeeze from a Gazan stone, never mind what wriggling plots he’s going to unearth under the Lebanese boulder.
The most obvious and direct solution is the US send the IDF arms, and they should stop. That’s not happening - at the absolute minimum, not before the election is done, and Trump’s likely to drag out the post-election chaos for many more weeks. This is a lot of why I don’t weigh in on IP much: even more than most issues, I don’t have the solutions. I can just say that the constant scrabbling for any minor tactical advantage, at an enormous humanitarian cost, is dead wrong.
Wrong based on the fundamental worth of every human being, every civilian who didn’t choose this, and wrong because this strategy hasn’t worked all the times before and it isn’t going to work now. This breakthrough moment isn’t the transformation that’ll magically end all war in the Middle East. It’s just another weapon in an overstocked arsenal, and a weapon with the power to terrorise an entire nation in a brand new way. We can only hope this won’t blossom into another regional war in the Middle East.
(There aren’t any particular spoilers ahead.)
Speaking of interminable violence, Narcos: Mexico is not very good.
It’s not very bad, either. I may be doing my first critical media watch, but I didn’t mind sitting through its thirty episodes. Some of the strengths of Narcos remain. The show has good cinematography; the shots are bright and colourful. Important action scenes sometimes reach for high moments, with the Walkman scene in the Season One finale particularly standing out. There are no standout trappings of bad TV I can think of.
However, it’s kind of astonishing how much Narcos: Mexico loses the Narcos magic, like the coyote has suddenly looked down. Narcos, by all rights, should have bored me to tears, with its stock noir narration about how everybody was corrupt and good and evil were blended neapolitan and its constant shootouts and escapes. Yet Narcos had a point: its themes of self-propelling war and family humanising monsters, and its clear, clean, simple delivery of key moments in the history of the Colombian drug war, complete with insights into government and military operations.
Narcos: Mexico chooses to drop a lot of these elements. The result is a world that is far muddier and feels much more like a generic crime show than a historical retelling. Walt becomes decently compelling, but is not as strong a narrator as Narcos’ - the journalist narrator in the final season also sounds stilted to me, but that might just be a language/accent inflection thing plus working with a slightly hamfisted script so I’m not too fussed.
The cartels and families melt into an indistinct blob, and here I have no concerns that watching a subtitled show set in a different cultural background is playing into that given how Narcos had the exact same barriers and yet so much more strongly communicated the distinct figures of the Medellin and Cali cartels. With practically no window into the government or military, we miss out on so much of what could be interesting. The theoretical thesis statement of Narcos: Mexico - how did such a huge, populous country dissolve into a bloodsoaked state that has lost the monopoly on violence? - is never really answered, a jaw-dropping flop given how much better that summary of the American perspective on Mexico is known than anything about Colombia.
Besides that central, simple fault - that Narcos made sense and brought you along on its engaging and educational journey, and Narcos: Mexico lost all that momentum and clarity - the other big dropoff is in performances and casting. Narcos is full of strong and memorable performances, and nobody stood out for me that way in Narcos: Mexico. When it comes to the big names, Michael Pena feels wasted, and…listen, I’m trying to become a Diego Luna believer, I love Andor and I love whenever he locks in and starts hissing under his breath in that way only he can, but as somebody curious to see if he can really outshine Season One’s scenestealers in S2,
But.
Diego Luna feels completely miscast here as a brilliant, ruthless drug lord who unites all the cartels in a megaoperation while also dealing with his failure to connect with his own family. He doesn’t feel threatening and he doesn’t feel like a force as an operator. He’s just kind of genial and driven, and, yeah, it doesn’t land. For a character who should supposedly be so key to that aforementioned theme - without the linchpin, everything falls apart - his removal from the show doesn’t feel meaningful.
It’s a shame, because I don’t want to trash a Mexican actor getting to take point on a production set in Mexico on a subject so often sensationalised and caricatured by America, but he could not get the most out of this role (Rogue One’s casting of him certainly seems like a better fit, whatever doubts I have about him as an actor he’s great in that). And I don’t think in general that it’s a cringeworthy exploitation of Mexico.
But I didn’t feel, either, like I was living and breathing Mexico, the way so many scenes in Narcos are just about quiet day-to-day life in Colombia. I simply felt like I was skipping constantly between cutscenes in an action movie I had to play because it came up for free on Epic Games, and once I’d done my perfunctory duty to see it to the end, I’d uninstall and not think about it again. Would not recommend watching, which is a real shame, because I wish we had an electric six-season Narcos Cinematic Universe. But that’s the way it goes sometimes: the hand only stays hot for so long.
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