Until this year’s Japanese tsunami, 9/11 was the worst destruction I had ever seen in the developed world. On the day it happened, like everyone else, I can remember where I was.

I was being lunched by some telecoms executives (a rare event), I can’t remember why, but it was in the London restaurant world of Charlotte Street. My mobile rang and my newsdesk told me an “aircraft has hit one of the twin towers in New York”. Relieved of my somewhat dull circumstance, I pounded back to the studios on my bike, imagining in my mind’s eye a small Piper aircraft embedded in the glass of the tower.

The scale of what I saw streaming into our newsroom on the newsfeed stunned me. Within moments we were “on air” and talking live to the pictures as we saw them. At one point we could see people falling to their deaths from the upper floors burning building – I began to wonder whether we were treating their desperate deaths with the dignity they deserved. We never rebroadcast them.

Amid the shock, I had a premonition of terrible reprisal and consequence. But for weeks, amazingly nothing happened, but then Afghanistan was launched, and soon Iraq too. Our decade of war was with us.

The searing memory of 9/11 itself for me is enshrined in a rare visit right into the very heart of Ground Zero a few weeks after the attack. Journalists were banned – images had to be grabbed from the perimeters of the site. But my friend, the celebrated American panoramic photographer, Joel Meyerowitz, had been given special access to record the site from day one for the New York Parks Department.

He was the one lone cameraman on site everyday for the first three months of rescue and recovery. He called me up and told me to fly over to New York suggesting I and my own camerman, Malcolm Hicks, accompany him into the site as his “assistants”. We got away with it. Our film portrayed the horrific wreckage from ground level and below. The detritus was still steaming and hot; the smell was all but unbearable; and the tiny fragments of so many human lives brought home all too vividly the scale of loss and somehow the inevitability of retaliation.

So that 9/11 for me is also entwined with the consequences of that retaliation. On the ground in Baghdad, in the horror and fear of life and death: The blast walls; the Humvees; the telltale suicide bomb blasts and consequent towers of smoke that located the bomb toward which we hurried for news; the strewn limbs and pools of blood; the wailing mothers and people on the panicked move.

I have not reported from Afghanistan in this phase of conflict – nor from Saudi Arabia – but both, together with Iraq, have dominated my own reporting decade ever since that eleventh day of September 2001. Pray God it is a decade the like of which we shall never know again.

Follow @jonsnowC4 on Twitter.

So, Tony Blair‘s Head of M15 opposed the “war on terror”. Eliza Manningham-Buller also opposed the invasion of Iraq. I wonder whether she said so at the time. Her confession comes in a Reith lecture to be broadcast next week – but it is already in the can. One wonders whether by the time the Iraq Inquiry reports there will be anyone to be found beyond the former  Prime Minister and his old friend George W Bush, to defend either the “war on terror”, or the invasion.

And yet, beyond Robin Cook and a tiny handful of other political rebels, there were only two “officials” who put their beliefs on the line at the time. The redoubtable Elizabeth Wilmshurst – number two in the Foreign Office legal department – and Carne Ross, a senior UK diplomat at the UN – both paid the ultimate price in both nobility and pensions, in resigning over it all. Both were fast rising stars in their departments, none of their superiors saw fit to join them.

Carne Ross’s book, The Leaderless Revolution, is published this week. I have read it, and it is a remarkable call to arms. Ross believes the present domestic and international “system” cannot deliver the change the world urgently needs and calls on the individual citizen to play his and her part as never before.

The Iraq war is far from over. The killing continues apace – 250 civilians a month according to latest figures from Baghdad. A suicide bomber killed 29 in the capital’s biggest mosque last weekend alone. Just before the invasion, Tony Blair summoned four of the UK’s top Iraq analysts to Number 10 to advise him. All four counselled strongly against going ahead with it. As they left, after a solid one and a half hours of deliberation, Mr Blair is reported by one of the academics as saying: “But you do agree, don’t you, that Saddam is a very bad man?”

Another “very bad man” is still lurking about in Libya today. I first encountered Gaddafi in the 1970s. His was a Green Book-supported cult of personality – but a strangely egalitarian one. Libyans initially did rather well out of him – he spread the wealth about and spent on schooling and health. But as with all such cults, the green turned to brown, and eventually to black, tinged with the red blood of those who opposed his dictatorship.

Once again, the west allowed itself to become obsessed with another “very bad man” with oil. As our own Lindsey Hilsum has observed, the Libyan matter may not end easily or soon and could yet be messy. The rather nicer man, King-Al Kalifa of Bahrain, whom I found Tony Blair taking tea with in Sharmel Sheikh when I went to interview him there on the last day of 2005, has been left alone to bludgeon some of his country’s people and their doctors back into order. The US has this week rewarded him by extending the rental on Bahrain’s bunkering facilities for the US navy until 2016.

We are left with the son of another “very bad man” President Assad of Syria, who continues to kill his people unabated, and unfettered by any misgivings of the west. The nice erstwhile ophthalmologist from Willesden had been seen as infinitely nicer than the father who slaughtered 10,000 of his people in a go. Syria’s continuing bloodshed will bubble up to the top of the page if Libya does begin to settle. But with less oil, and the UK and others suffering defence cuts, the eye specialist is likely to benefit from the west’s blind eye for a time yet.

Follow @jonsnowC4 on Twitter.

The killing in Pakistan of the Governor of Punjab by his own bodyguard on Tuesday, marks a devastating new high water mark both inside and outside that country. It comes in the wake of a year in which Christian communities all over the Middle East and beyond have come under pressure.
Against a backdrop in which Iraq has proved the infernal crucible for religious intolerance in which a thousand more of the country’s Christians have had to flee and in which many have been killed – in one instance amid the bombing of their church – it is important to take stock.

New year saw the attack on a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria in Egypt in which 21 Egyptian Christians died.

Now there is the Pakistan assassination in which pressure on Christians has reportedly again played a part. The Governor, Salman Taseer had been prominent in attempting to defend Asia Bibi. She’s a Christian who was condemned to death last November under Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws – laws Mr Taseer had also been more than prominent in attempting to reverse.

Two questions are in the air today. When two of the most openly-declared Christians to lead either Britain or America in recent times – Tony Blair and George W Bush – led the war on Iraq in 2003, what role has it subsequently played in the oppression of Christians in the region? And what role are the Saudis playing in the continued religiously-led radicalisation of of Pakistan?

Saudi Arabia’s embrace of, and dedicated export of Wahibiism, is most clearly identified in Pakistan through the hundreds of Saudi-funded madrassas. One of the central tenets of Wahabiism is the refusal to tolerate rival religious practices. Saudi funding for Iraqi Sunni Islamic groups – banned under Saddam, have been allowed free reign since US led invasion. Saudi funded madrassas, book shops and publishing in Britain are also claimed to be radicalising ethnic British Pakistani Britons.

The roles of messrs Blair, Bush, and the Saudi king, are unlikely to be uppermost in the minds of those see today’s state funeral for the dead Governor of Punjab. In any case many who have studied and reported the region fear that it is already too late to put the radical genie back in the bottle.

Iraq is a country I have visited many times since I was first there to report from the front line of the harrowing Iran/iraq war in 1980. Foreign intervention and interference has dogged it for more than a century. No wonder Baghdad is seized with parties and celebration.

For the promised American pull-out from Iraq starts today. US forces start pulling out of urban areas in the country on what the Iraqi government has declared to be National Sovereignty Day.

This is not the end of the US-led occupation, merely the beginning of the end. 131,000 US forces remain and will do so until the cessation of combat operations in September 2010 and the eventual pull-out in 2011.

And the US and her allies leave amid an alarming upsurge of bomb attacks (200 dead in a week). Is it too fanciful to suggest that this horrifying adventure spells the last of such “wars of choice”?

Nonetheless, a military adventure which displaced some 4 million Iraqis, killed and wounded as many as a million (we shall never know the true figure), and reduced the country’s precious oil output to the point where, even today, it remains below that of Saddam’s final year in power, is coming to an end.

That adventure also shredded the reputation of Tony Blair at home and divided Europe as never before. This is before we even begin to estimate the financial costs of the war, which run into trillions of dollars.

So what were the Iraq war aims? To safeguard oil supplies? To remove Saddam? To instil a new democracy in the heart of the Middle East? To find and destroy weapons of mass destruction? To provide a bulwark against, and to reduce the power of, Iran?

Six new oilfield contracts are to be auctioned today, but production is still stagnant and the oil law is still stuck in the Iraqi parliament. Saddam has been replaced by an upsurge in radical religiously backed parties that threaten civil war at any turn.

Democracy has delivered a factional parliament and, in the prime minister, the firm hand that Iraq has grown used to. Water and power supplies remain inadequate. And Iran, despite recent events, is stronger than at any time since the Islamic revolution of 1979.

Perhaps Iraq enjoys a greater collective spirit of hope than at any recent time. But that hope has come expensively, and there is still a ways to go.

It is hard to imagine that history will smile on the two men, Bush and Blair, who decided to take the world in to this war – although it isn’t beyond the wit of Europe to reward one of them (who defied the majority of EU leaders on the war) with its presidency.

Gordon Brown will announce an inquiry into the Iraq war this week. My sources tell me that this will not be chaired by a judge, senior or retired. It will be chaired instead by a historian.

The hot tip in Whitehall is that it is likely to be the respected Churchill and Holocaust scholar Sir Martin Gilbert.

There are enormous risks to reputations – not least that of Tony Blair as he strives to become president of Europe (a real prospect). Securing that post for Mr Blair is said to be one of Lord Mandelson’s many responsibilities.

The government wants the build-up and political decisions that led Britain to war to be the focus of the inquiry. With judges such as former lord chief justice Lord Bingham having declared the war “a serious violation of international law and the rule of law”, there was never any expectation that the government would risk a judicial inquiry with the power of subpoena. And it may believe it has a safe pair of hands in Sir Martin Gilbert.

But Gilbert’s passion rests in contemporaneous documents. He will want the release of the mass of email traffic, the extraordinary secret service stuff that intersected with the dodgy dossier and the rest. He’s likely to insist on getting them. A historian can’t do much without the paperwork.

Critics argue that if the inquiry is chaired by a layman like Sir Martin Gilbert, then as with the Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, the make-up of the panel that sits with him will be critical. Many have felt that Macpherson would never have arrived at the concept of “institutional racism” in the police without the input of those who sat with him.

Another chapter in these “interesting times”.