Adding my voice to the ship that has sailed of Runaway Generalgate, I came across some similarly late commentary. Saliently, they observe that Hastings' wasn't anti-McCrystal, but rather anti-war. (No idea as to the veracity of his feelings regarding McCrystal, as no one else has mentioned this, to my knowledge, but it opened the door to some interesting speculation, below.)
Framed thusly, Hastings' decision to include the quotes wasn't with the intention of counting coup on a four-star, but rather a clueless reporter writing about a subject he knew little about who thought those quotes sounded like how a badass soldier would sound. Compared to the quotes found elsewhere in the piece, such as those by line soldiers talking about RoEs and how they wanted to kill more people, McCrystal's comments sound "raw" and "authentic", especially to someone unfamiliar with military vernacular, i.e. the entire readership of the article. When you meet the military in the multiplex, you kinda expect them to sound like that.
Of course, that just changes Hastings' from a vindictive ambitious little scribbler to a writer assigned a topic he has no business writing about, given a loaded gun of quotes, and enabled by editors who should have known better. Hastings' general ignorance of both the theory and practice of COIN is made manifest throughout the article. He quotes the right buzzwords, but in weird places and in a rhythm that suggests he crammed for the exam the night before and is regurgitating something he doesn't quite understand, transliterating his jotted notepad notes into longform prose.
That Hastings' titled his piece "The Runaway General" suggests he knew the impact those quotes would have. All the same, I don't struggle very hard to imagine a Rolling Stones reporter (even one with an anti-war public record) with little to no experience with war zones or the military to be semi-awed by the environment and people. He thinks he's graduated from the kiddy table, and ready to sit with the adults. Eager to prove he belongs, he repeats this really funny off-color joke Uncle Tommy told him last week, and then gets confused when people get awkward and angry instead of laughing.
Napoleon once said "never attribute to malice what can be better explained by incompetence". Reading through the article, I'm left with the impression that Hastings' would be perfect writing about a rock star or a writer or even a pol. But warfare isn't something one should write about in ignorance, nor about warriors, even if you do like them.
