Add me to the list of those vaguely confused by hubbub over TNR's backpage diarist featuring an anonymous solider detailing some acts of wartime cruelty. I think it's a discomfiting piece of work, and its implications are more meaningful for the TNR view than I think TNR realizes (this is what happens in war, and it should make us more reticent about force's capability to do anything that involves the continued cooperation and goodwill of an occupied populace), but it's hardly obviously false, and if it were, it wouldn't obviously matter.
Put another way, this ain't WMDs, or even Bush's national guard record. If some soldier who's published with TNR before was able to bamboozle them with some boastful stories of enlisted cruelty, so be it. Magazines can be fooled -- that's part of the risk in relying on humans to write your stories based on things they claim to have seen -- and if this is one of those cases, then it's just a couple of isolated anecdotes. The larger point is true. You can watch this video, for instance, wherein a group of American soldiers crush the car of some Iraqis who were trying to steal some wood: