The U.S. is struggling with an information war as well as a shooting war in Iraq. Many civilians think troops are behind insurgent violence.

Hussein Ramadan sells synthetic flowers in Baghdad. He doesn't trust the United States.

"These car bombs are mostly done by Americans," he said. "When they are searching you at a checkpoint, one is putting an explosive device in the car. Then they will chase the car, and as soon as he goes into a populated area, it will blow up. This is what has happened, not in all cases but some."

Iraq is awhirl in rumors.

Amid fires in the night and mortar rounds pounding city and village, this nation, where so much is uncertain, feeds on the half-truths and conspiracies that U.S. forces are struggling to contain in what has become an information war. The gossip on the street and the grisly images flickering across Arab television are doing as much to undermine American authority as well-armed insurgents staging ambushes on desert highways.

Reality is pliable and truth is altered to serve agendas in a society where stories, myths and superstitions have shaped public discourse for centuries.

Among the ideas that seemed to collapse along with the twin towers two years ago was a view of globalization as a kind of manifest destiny. Unlike the 19th-century version of manifest destiny, this vision didn't involve expanding America's borders. Rather, America's values — notably economic and political liberty — would spread beyond those borders, covering the planet. And this time around America's mission didn't have the widely assumed blessing of God. But it had the next best thing: the force of history. Globalization was seen by some as a nearly inevitable climax of the human story — destiny of a secular sort.

Rubin suggests that in cultures that permit males to have multiple wives we find a large number of sexually frustrated angry young men who are also from lower socioeconomic strata. This situation generates great social tension and political repression by the ruling elite. It also greatly enhances for men with wives to engage in extreme forms of 'mate guarding' - seclusion and control of women - because of the large number of young men who are on the make. Ultimately, Rubin suggests, this promotes terrorism in that given that these men have very poor reproductive prospects, they are more likely to sacrifice their own lives if this is likely to provide advantages for their close kin.

Evolutionary Psychology and understanding Moslem-Western tensions