Just weeks before the start of the war however as part of the charade

Just weeks before the start of the war, however, as part of the charade in the UN, he said that Saddam could stay in power if he would only destroy his WMD. Consequently his statement to Charles Kennedy does nothing except to add to his increasingly absurd predicament.LEIGH JACKSON London SW17Sir: Charles Kennedy is the latest senior politician to describe the Iraq War as the greatest foreign policy disaster since Suez (14 October).The Suez campaign saw fewer than 1,000 casualties (almost none of them civilian) and merely caused embarrassment to two former colonial powers (Britain and France) who were firmly put into their place in the new world order by the USA.Contrast Iraq, with a minimum of 10,000 civilian casualties, instabilities is the region that will last for decades and a vastly increased risk to British citizens, both at home and abroad.Suez didn’t come close. I would like to ask the Government where would the children failed by the mainstream system get a meaningful education (as is their right) with the Government doing nothing to stop the closure of special schools through the country. If nothing is done soon, a vital layer of education will be lost.S J PHILPS Witham St Hughs, Lincolnshire Blair’s UN charade Sir: Replying to Charles Kennedy in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Tony Blair defended the decision to go to war with Iraq by saying, “If [Mr Kennedy] had had his way, let’s be clear about this: Saddam Hussein and his sons would still be running Iraq. Just because inclusion is difficult doesn’t mean it is a mistake or can’t be achieved.

Given the right attitude and resources, it can provide educational and social benefits for disabled and non-disabled children alike.As Monday’s Ofsted report makes clear, disabled children can do well when mainstream schools adapt to their needs. But the wholesale closure of so many excellent specialist environments over the past generation, driven largely by cost-cutting legitimised by polarised policies, has meant a terrible loss of capacity and expertise within specialist education. Vulnerable children adrift from environments adapted to their needs get stressed, develop “behaviour problems” and become further marginalised; but it is really the planning process that has the behaviour problem.Specialist environments are currently being reinvented apace and perhaps in the future some kind of balance can be struck. Specialist environments can be characterised as ghetto or haven: the trouble with such simplistic polarisation is the resulting pendulum shifts of policy in a complex area, further amplified and made cruder during implementation.Good specialist environments for children with significant special needs have always been necessary places where creative professional solutions to their care can be worked through. But these pendulum shifts in public policy continue to waste time and talent and disrupt families’ lives.Dr JONATHAN GREEN Senior Lecturer, Dept of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry University of ManchesterSir: We are concerned at the suggestion that including disabled pupils in mainstream schools isn’t working (“Mainstreaming fails ‘fragile’ disabled pupils”, 12 October). The distortions of language they employed to make the case for war are surely proof of Derrida’s claims about the nature of words. These are fundamentalist minds acting, like the Islamic fundementalists they call the enemy, in the belief that there is one truth and it is known to them.

The world is then twisted to fit.Until we can learn to respect and engage with other views contrary to our own there will be no peace or any meaningful human progress. We need to think more and think better if we are to survive the challenges the 21st century presents us with Dismissing important thinkers is unhelpful. Postmodernism is a “dead end” only because we have not yet learned to think in a way that allows us to move beyond it.MATTHEW CROCKATT London SE5 Shifts in policy harm vulnerable children Sir: News that Mary Warnock is calling for a further review of polices on the integration of young people with special needs in education is predictable but depressing (report, 12 October).For many of us who work intimately day-to-day with children with special needs it was entirely predictable that the idea of a universalist inclusion policy was a fantasy that could never work in practice. There is a group of more subtle difficulties that can and should be properly managed in inclusive mainstream environments and Warnock was right on this.

Parents generally know exactly what their children need: they like well-functioning specialist institutions for this reason. The most advanced scientific research has discovered many things that seem bizarre to common sense: the possibility of quantum particles existing in two positions at the same time, for example, or Einstein proving time is relative rather than the Newtonian linear progression we perceive.Perhaps what we need is a paradigm shift in the way in which we think about ourselves and our relation to the world. The 20th century, the most destructive in history, stands as testament to the danger of Enlightenment thought and of the seductive power of truth.Our political leaders continue the prosecution of their specious “war on terror” while spinning the world out of shape. While advances in science cannot be denied and are rightly celebrated, the belief that technological progress equals human progress is delusional.

As John Grey and others have pointed out, our culture is fixated on the Enlightenment. All our thought is based on a belief in the power of reason and empiricism to further human progress. There’s nothing bands or their fans hate more than spouses getting too close to the action. But Miss Paltrow seems not to realise that, this year more than ever, Yoko Ono’s reputation has been re-evaluated.