The key to making problems like the Two Generals Problem solvable is to categorize some failure modes as annoying but tolerable. For example, a variation analogous to a mutex would have a goal of attacking the enemy with only one general's army, and regard the possibility of both generals' armies attacking at once as unacceptable (e.g. because they'd be clobbered by each others' artillery). Having both generals hold off on attacking the enemy would be undesirable, but better than having both attack.
Under that scenario, generals Bob and Joe would have three states between them: Bob expects that Joe might attack, and Joe knows he will; Joe expects that Bob might attack, and Bob knows he will; or Bob and Joe each expect that the other might attack, but neither is actually planning to do so.
If any general who wants to attack and doesn't yet know that he's clear to do so will send messages until a go-ahead is received, the only reasons the generals would remain in the third state would be if either neither wants to attack (in which case being in that state is fine), or attempts at communication continuously fail (Bob and Joe could coordinate so that an attack will be possible if 1.5 round trips are completed while at least one of them wants to attack).
Note that the original Two Generals Problem only has two outcomes: successful, and intolerable. Here, classifying the third outcome (neither general attacks) as annoying but tolerable shifts the problem from being unsolvable to being easily tractible.
Applying that to a mutex, if two entities each think the other might alter a resource without further coordination, and will thus hold off on any attempt to alter it themselves unless they are cleared to do so, one may end up in situations where neither party will be able to alter a resource in the absence of a working communications link, but it would nonetheless be possible to guarantee that nobody would alter a resource when the other party wasn't aware of that possibility.
