Modern day Strangelove?

Wag the Dog was about a spin-doctor purposely making up a fake war.

This is (probably) about a group of military officers executing a very real war, but being very disrespectful and cocky in front of a reporter.

Have you read the book, The Operators? The jaw-dropping irony of the story is that the war correspondent Michael Hastings was invited into General McChrystal's fold and allegedly given nearly unlimited access to their candid conversations about the war, politicians, and allied forces, because they were so cocksure of themselves and their style and swagger...and then he was blamed for reporting what he witnessed, because they had allegedly told much of that to him off the record. They saw him writing in dozens of notepads and pressing the button for 20 hours of audio recordings in their various meetings, but then when they embarrassed themselves, it was all suddenly supposed to have been hush-hush. This reporter was supposed to uphold the cult of personality surrounding this general, instead of...um...reporting.

How do you trip over your third leg by sharing that much with a reporter, and then get surprised by it? How do you not know that a war correspondent is going to report what you tell him about the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of this war? How do you overshare like that? How do you let yourself be that blunt, that disrespectful in front of a potential muckraker reporter? How do you think that that could possibly end well?

The black comedy (at least in the book) is that the real US Army officers in question thought they could do no wrong, thought they would never be held accountable for anything. They had each other, and they thought that that would be enough for them to win the battle of wills with the President, to win the hearts and minds of Afghans, to win the war, and to win over their embedded Rolling Stone reporter. All this, even though their actual execution of the war contradicted almost every tenet of the counterinsurgency strategy that they had laid out to the President and to the leaders of all the other allied Coalition nations.

They gave this reporter the gun, and then they loaded it full of ammunition...so how did they not know that they were going to get shot in the ass with it?

(Man, I should totally get some compensation for writing the movie's tagline for them like that!)