From David J. Morris at The Virginia Quarterly Review Blog, as good a summary as you’ll find about what they were thinking and why. A key excerpt:
It is still a little difficult to believe that an accomplished fifty-five-year-old officer would say and allow his staff to say the outrageous things in the Rolling Stone article. You can just hear the chorus in Washington: “What was he thinking?” But then, I think McChrystal and his buddies didn’t expect that Hastings would actually write down everything they said and put it into print. It’s an unfortunate staple of Beltway journalism that has bled over into war reporting that most reporters are loathe to burn their sources by writing derogatory things about them. To be blunt, most reporters are as career-obsessed as the officers they’re interviewing and they don’t want to poison the well. This is doubly true if the officer being interviewed is a four-star general. There is a simple reciprocity involved: if you want to be invited back to ride on The Boss’s helicopter, if you want continued access, you’d better not write about his soft spot for strippers and gin. That said, it’s a naturally antagonistic relationship and most officers hate reporters because they represent a threat to their reputations. There are no medals awarded for conspicuous gallantry in a press conference. . . .
Enter into this mix Michael Hastings, a reporter who apparently had made a decision at some point to not play by the normal rules; who can be friendly, interested, and reasonably non-threatening in-person; whose brother is an army officer; and who was writing for what is primarily a pop culture magazine. McChrystal and his staff, jangled and beat-down after literally years of being in and out of various combat zones, probably thought they were coming across as hip and irreverent in front of the Rolling Stone guy, knowing that there was a far better chance their teenage daughters were going to read about them there than in the back pages of the National Review. Of course, many of those staff officers are now dealing with what amounts to the final mistake of their careers within an organization that doesn’t forgive much in the way of media fiascos.
Link via Andrew Sullivan.