Our armchair war correspondent in London has 10 more wartime mysteries on which to ponder. Some of you may have the answers.

Mystery 1: What is there about the Kurdish part of Turkey that makes the Turks so mad keen to hang on to it? Would they not do better to allow a sovereign Kurdish state to be created and to do a deal over the export of its oil? Being land locked, the new state would have to get into bed with someone.

Mystery 2: Since the traditional and probably only way to deal with looters is to shoot them on sight (they are easily spotted as they carry away mattresses and refrigerators) and, since you cannot expect this of an army of liberation, why didn't the coalition foresee the problem and bring in a uniformed police force formed from civilian police services drawn from every coalition country? One looter, shot in the legs, will encourage a thousand others to stay at home. The first action of the Interim Authority would be to take charge of this temporary police service.

Mystery 3: Why didn't the coalition task specific units with going into Iraq government buildings in which computers and documents providing evidence of the brutality of the regime could be expected to be found? The worst aspect of looting is the needless theft or destruction of items that might provide closure for relatives of missing persons and the location of weapons of mass destruction.

Mystery 4: Why do we not see specially programmed public address systems and pre-printed notices in Arabic, car and people control barriers to deal with the checkpoint problem? Why have we not seen any explosive sniffing dogs? It is not as if suicide bombers are a new phenomenon in the Middle East (Hey! That's not fair!! Ed.)

Mystery 5: Are the "women in black" - by which I mean women wearing traditional Moslem dress particularly in evidence in Basra and other Shiite areas - as contented with their lot as would appear from the television footage? With a majority of women in the United States on tranquilisers and/or visiting head shrinks and/or fighting old age with cosmetic surgery I would think that they would be well advised to avoid westernisation. .

Mystery 6: If Saddam never thought for a moment that he would lose the war, just why are so many of the palaces unfurnished?

Mystery 7: What plans do the Coalition have for a new currency? They must surely have loads of it pre-printed and ready to be issued? Likewise new postage stamps? There is good money waiting to be made in first day covers. Does anyone realise this?

Mystery 8: The word "rape" has not been mentioned once on television. One of the greatest benefits from embedding correspondents has been to prevent the unfounded accusations of rape and other atrocities by soldiers that have been thrown around in past campaigns. With the breakdown in Law and Order and Saddam's emptying of the prisons one would have least expected to hear of Iraqi-on-Iraqi rape. Is this happening? Or is rape foreign to the local culture? (No it's not, say Uday's many rape victims!! Ed.)

Mystery 9: Where are the looters driving around in their cars getting their petrol from? Why is it that bully-boy looters are not seizing cars from other looters? Is the breakdown in Iraqi society confined to looting?

Mystery 10: What sort of society exists in Syria? Is suppression of freedom of speech, means of communication (mobile telephones, Internet, satellite TV), imprisonment, murder and torture of dissidents as rife as it was in Iraq? Will there be an internally generated regime change when the Syrians see what is happening in Iraq? (See this, Ed.)